Given the choice, I'd vote for a sea lion

For a long time, I wanted to be a behavioural ecologist when I grew up. I had come to biology via watching birds and David Attenborough programmes, read The Selfish Gene (which is bascially a very good book about behavioural ecology) at an impressionable age, and in the early 90s it seemed like a really vibrant and exciting area.

But now it seems to have been a victim of that success — almost (to exaggerate) a completed science. We have a set of ideas that have been very successful at explaining animal behaviour in evolutionary terms — kin selection, optimal foraging, various models of sexual selection, and a few others. Most aspects of animal behaviour seem explicable in terms of one or other, and nothing seems to need a big new idea to explain it. I'd be interested to hear anyone else's thoughts on this (particularly if you disagree).

Anyway, this is really just a preamble before I mention some recent behaviour papers that caught my eye. Behavioural ecology might not be white hot, but it still delivers high on the fancy-that factor.

For example, did you know that sea lions are masters of self control? If you offer them a pile of five fish or a lone fish, and then give them the one they don't choose, they quickly learn to choose the smaller reward — more quickly, in fact than primates, who keep lunging helplessly for the bigger pile (I don't think they offered the primates fish. Probably bananas, or something.).

Not only that, diving seals can hold off digesting their dinner until they surface, to reduce the amount of oxygen they use up underwater.

One area of behavioural research that's still kicking up dust is, of course, evolutionary psychology. Here, for example is a worrying paper from Evolution and Human Behaviour looking at the influence of face shape on voting decision:

We show that differences in facial shape alone between candidates can predict who wins or loses in an election.

Anthony Little and his colleagues took the faces of recent election opponents — Kerry/Bush, Blair/Howard, and several others from around the world. They recreated the differences between the two candidates' faces on neutral models, so that subjects wouldn't recognize them, and then tweaked them to exaggerate the difference (not sure why they did this — it seems to undermine the study's claims to reflect reality). Then they showed the faces to people, and asked who they would rather vote for, without any other information.

The percentage preferences for the simulated faces predicted fairly well the destination of votes cast in actual elections.

The Sunday Times reported on this at the weekend.

Little speculates that voters chose Blair because his skin looked healthier than Major and his face, with a strong jaw and thinner lips, looked more masculine than Hague. “Firm jaws and heavy brows denote masculinity,” he said.

Perhaps more reassuringly, they found that "there may be no general characteristics of faces that can win votes". People asked to choose a peace- or wartime leader, for example, prefer different sorts of faces — wartime voters prefer a more dominant, masculine face, apparently. Sigh. I imagine doctors of spin are already out with the callipers and booking their men and women in for plastic surgery.

An obscenity

This is beyond the usual scope of this blog, and I know there're a lot of bad things happening in the world, but to take a group of people who came to your country to work in your medical system, accuse them, despite an overwhelming body of evidence to the contrary, of infecting children deliberately with HIV, torture them, refuse to hear relevant evidence in court, and then sentence them to death - in what mainly seems to be an attempt to cover-up the shoddiness of one's own procedures - seems particularly shameful and grotesque.

Let's hope that the Libyan government has some sense of justice and humanity, and overturns this decision.

Nature's Declan Butler has done a fine job of reporting this story.

It's lonely out here

There's an interesting post on Evolgen about the paucity of ecology bloggers. Although the discussion seems to have wandered off-message rather. I reckon that one of my previous rambles about ecology's general media-unfriendliness may be relevant to this issue.

The way things go

If, like me, you're a fan of the conservation of momentum, chemical reactions, kettles, stink, bangs, 70s board-game Mousetrap, or 70s BBC2 show The Great Egg Race, get down to Tate Modern and check out Fischli & Weiss's "The way things go' (Der Lauf Der Dinge).

This piece of video art, part of an F&W retrospective showing at the Tate until January, shows an absurdly convoluted and entertaining chain reaction of things bumping, rolling and swinging into each other, not to mention setting each other on fire, inflating, puncturing, foaming, and so on. It's not exactly science, but you can see a sort-of-science (or engineering, at least) thought process behind it that ought to appeal to anyone in the least bit geeky. It reminds me of the great domino-topples that seemed also to be on TV every week in my distant, distant youth (do they still do those?). And apparently it was ripped off by, I mean inspired, that Honda advert of a few years ago.

I didn't stay for the whole thing, which lasts 30 minutes, but what I did watch seemed to go on forever. Some of the slower parts were actually quite painful to witness. If you can't get to the Tate, don't worry. You can get a DVD (and see a trailer) here (I was sorely tempted - I envisioned showing it at Factory-style happenings in my groovy Shoxton loft, and I don't even live in a groovy Shoxton loft. Or own a DVD player.). Or you can see the first 7+ minutes on YouTube:

Make yourself happy

Thank God (or whoever else might be responsible) for the Onion.

Kansas Outlaws Practice Of Evolution.

The cost of leafing

This week's Nature has a news feature by me on leaves (why have they made 'plantecology' one word?). Specifically, it's about the patterns in leaf construction seen across all land plants, what causes them, and the consequences that they have for our understanding of the living world. (Lovers of waffle will not want to miss hearing me talk about this on the Nature podcast.)

[M]ost of the variation in the physical and biochemical properties of leaves can be represented on a single axis running, to put it crudely, from quick and juicy to slow and tough. [This is] the 'worldwide leaf economics spectrum', and it embodies many of the trade-offs that govern how plants deploy their resources within the limits that physics places on biological possibility.

The work … has attracted the attention of everyone, from plant physiologists studying how leaves work to biogeochemists looking at the cycling of nutrients on a global scale. In part, the paper is so popular because of the size and scope of the database that underlies the work; but the popularity also reflects the intellectual excitement that surrounds the discovery that so much can be explained by so little. This has given some ecologists hope that by looking at the large-scale patterns in how organisms work, they can gain a general understanding of why species live where they do, and why some are common and others are rare. Such findings are not of purely academic interest: climate researchers are using them to improve their models of the consequences of global warming.

For me, one of the most interesting aspects of writing this feature was investigating an idea among some ecologists that the best way to understand why species live where they do, and why some are common and others rare is to think not about species, but traits — such as leaf biology, seed size and number, and so on.

In some ways, this is counterintuitive. Most, perhaps all, cultures name the plants and animals around them, and recognize that they split into groups of similar kinds, i.e. species. Many ecologists come to the science through a love of natural history, and identifying and naming stuff. And consequently, many theories of biodiversity are rooted in what's been called 'nomenclatural ecology':

To try to understand things such as what determines the number of species that can coexist in a place, how numerous each species is, and how productive the system as a whole is, ecologists have traditionally looked at what species are present, how they interact, and how their abundance affects that of the others. Such an approach is an extension of ecology's roots in natural history, says Brian McGill of McGill University in Montreal, Canada. "People become ecologists because they love to go outdoors and look at the woods. They get attached to putting names on things, and get focused on knowing lots about particular organisms."

But this approach soon becomes intractably knotty, as the number of possible interactions between species rises geometrically with the number of species. "We don't have the capacity to learn as much as we need to know by studying one species at a time. Studying interactions between species, and then trying to build that up, hasn't panned out. It's too complicated," explains McGill.

Traits — such as, for leaves, mass-per-area, or photosynthetic rate — are measurable, and comparable in a way that species names aren't, and also allow one to quantify natural variation. I think of this as dropping below the species level, to look at the components of biology — how organisms work, and how they differ — and I've a hunch it might offer a way out of the current morass of different theories to explain the origin and maintenance of biodiversity. Of which there are tons — it did my head in trying to get to grips with this area.

Of course, to make satisfying science, one wants to be able to turn trait studies back into predictions about species, because as human beings that's how we perceive the world.

But this looks like it might be possible — Science recently published an extremely cool paper by Bill Shipley and colleagues using trait measurements and, to my satisfaction, maximum entropy theory to predict the abundance and distribution of plants in abandoned French vineyards with 94% accuracy. Which is pretty damn good.

I confess, I really should have covered this in ITBOAH, but it didn't cross my path while I was writing this. Very sorry, ITBOAH-readers.

Review: Genes in Conflict

I've got a piece (registration required) in the current London Review of Books on Genes in Conflict by Austin Burt and Robert Trivers.

The book's a brilliant resource, bringing together what must be pretty much every piece of information on selfish genetic elements, such as transposable elements, selfish sex chromosomes and imprinted genes. These genes can thrive at the expense of the organisms that carry them, causing conflict and selection to operate within genomes and organisms, as well as between them.

Such conflict has led to some extremely odd biology (such as the sperm that can eject the maternal chromosomes from the eggs they 'fertilize'), some extremely fundamental aspects of our biology (such as the uniparental inheritance of mitochondria, and probably some details of mitosis and sex itself), and some extremely interesting potential effects on our behaviour and psychology, caused by different bits of the genome pulling in different directions. I imagine this will be explored further in Trivers' next book, which is apparently going to be about the evolution and uses of self-deception.

This is the sort of book that would work splendidly as an online resource — it doesn't take a linear approach (early on the authors say it can be read in any order, which is a bit dispiriting for a reviewer settling down to read the whole thing), so hyperlinking would be valuable. And this is such a fast-moving field that regular updates would be welcome (such as, say, the power of transposable elements as a creative force in evolution, which is a bit off-message from the book's main thrust, but an exciting area, as a recent N&V feature (registration required) in Nature shows). Magisterial overviews such as this still clearly have a place on academic bookshelves, but they need to cope with the way that the internet has made the information they collate easier to find and access.

Leonardo's notebooks

Anyone interested in science would do worse than go to the Leonardo da Vinci exhibtion at London's V&A museum, running until 7 January. I went last week.

The exhibtion, of material from the man's notebooks isn't primarily an aesthetic experience (although there are some beautiful things there). What it's about is giving you an insight into Leonardo's thinking, and the full range of his preoccupations.

Nowadays, the term 'Renaissance man' is applied to any science PhD who's read a novel and got grade 3 clarinet (women tend to do lots of different things without running around giving themselves grand names). This exhibition shows you better than anything I've ever seen what being a Renaissance man really meant. Leonardo treated the artistic, scientific, mathematical, biological, architectural, mechanical, you name it, as all one and the same - often on the same sheet of paper. Designs for musical instruments are alongside those for palaces, and stage sets, which are alongside plans for epic murals, or engines of war, or anatomical drawings, or clouds. Astonishing.

On the science side, it looks very much as if he was thinking about problems, such as finding a shape's centre of gravity, or a volume's solid, that were solved by Newton/Leibniz's invention of calculus. He also seems to have pondered other Newtonian stuff, such as gravity and mechanics. (And he tried to square the circle, and build a perpetual motion machine. Nothing I could see on thurning base metals into gold, though.)

He also did some drawings on the form of trees, river networks, and blood vessels that (looking at things with a biased eye, I admit) intriguingly prefigures the network models of metabolic rate, river networks, and other stuff by West et al. and Banavar et al.

And here's a quote, presented in the exhibition, which could have come straight out of D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's mouth, and which sums up world view (one of them, anyway) I write about in ITBOAH:

"A bird is an instrument working according to mathematical law."

Pegged to this exhibtion, there's an interesting piece by Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones on how the notebooks ended up in the hands of the British royal family.

Is natural selection a law of physics?

More on applying the physics of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics to ecology and evolution. This paper by Guy Hoelzer and colleagues appeared recently in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology:

On the logical relationship between natural selection and self-organization

…In this study, we attempt to describe the logical framework that relates the general process of self-organization to the specific process of natural selection. We describe natural selection as a mechanism that coordinates the coevolution of species in an ecosystem to effectively capture, process and dissipate solar energy into the earth’s shadow. Finally, we conclude that natural selection is an emergent process founded on the same thermodynamic imperatives that are thought to underlie all self-organization. This perspective suggests … the possibility that there may be a physical basis for understanding the origin of the process of natural selection. Rather than being merely a fluke of nature, the origin of natural selection that may be driven by energy flows across gradients.

As an example of the kind of links between biology, thermodynamics, and self-organization that they are pursuing, Hoelzer et al. give photosynthesis. They point out how good it is at levelling out the gradient of solar energy, and suggesting either that "photosynthesizing life is a statistically favoured component of the biosphere, or that a high-flux channel for light transduction is a favoured endpoint, towards which perturbed ecosystems recover. Physical principles expressed in terms of stable end states imply a natural teleology, which we have suggested (somewhat imprecisely) is the reduction of the spectral and spatial energy gradient imposed by the situation of earth in a solar radiation bath."

They also invoke metabolic scaling theory, which explains living things' energy use in terms of the geometry of transport networks (something similar seems to apply to the geometry of lightning strikes and river basins), and suggest that a taking a self-organizational view is a good way to try and understand why, the more energy an organism uses (whether metabolically, or, for humans, in society), the fewer offspring it has. (More about all this here and in ITBOAH

Other striking quotes:

We offer the conjecture that the truly ultimate explanation for any dynamical event, and the qualities of any emergent dissipative structure, including organisms and ecosystems, is thermodynamic.

Natural selection is to self-organization as language is to communication. Language is not synonymous with communication, yet it is a quantum leap forward in communicative effectiveness. It is also not merely a more complicated for of simpler modes of communication. … Language has emerged from the drive to communicate just as natural selection has emerged from the drive to break down gradients.

Much of this is not particularly new. Dynamic, complex physical systems can take on orderly, structured states, and physicists such as Stuart Kaufmann have long suggested that the same principle applies to living things — that self-organization, as well as, or instead of, natural selection, can explain the complexity and structure of life.

Likewise, it's not a new idea that thermodynamics can explain the structure of life, and that this structure evolves to flatten out energy gradients as much as possible, and degrade energy/produce entropy as quickly as possible.

And biologists have usually resisted these concepts. Natural selection is so successful that bolt-ons from physics seem superfluous. There's no reason to believe that natural selection should maximize anything thermodynamic, and many biologists take issue with the assumptions and predictions of this approach. Someone once pointed out that the reason horses had evolved was to make more horses, not to make horse manure. John Maynard Smith thought harder about these things than most biologists, and (I think) remained sceptical. (Try here or here.)

So either all the current upsurge of this stuff is just a cyclic blip, or we're really inching towards some kind of new insight. I'm not sure which.

Bee genome

Social insects were my first great scientific enthusiasm, and I still think they're the coolest.

Their behaviour marvellously illustrates the power and subtlety of natural selection. Via kin selection, it can produce altruistic behaviour, but this only works as long as each individual is benefiting — and there is a constant temptation, even for social insects, to choose the selfish path, and rebel against the group.

Honey bees, for example have evolved sophisticated ways to keep selfishness in check, such as worker policing, where workers destroy the eggs laid by fellow workers (but would secretly like to lay eggs themselves).

So, the honey bee genome published in Nature last week is a good thing. But it doesn't tell us much about sociality - when Nature asked project Leader George Weinstock what the most surprising thing about the project was, he replied 'That we did not come up with breakthroughs in understanding social behaviour of the bee'.

Way to hook the public, George. But not really surprising, because the different castes and jobs within a beehive are determined by environment, and developmental factors — queens aren't decided by their genes, but by a diet of royal jelly. What job a worker does depends on its age — they start out as nursemaids, then move outwards, becoming guards, and finally foragers.

So gene regulation is going to be more important than gene content for understanding sociality. Perhaps this is why I found Nature's news and views piece on the genome, by (the great) E. O. Wilson, a tad disappointing — it's more an essay on bees, trotting out a bunch of well-known stuff, than anything that gets to grip with what the genome means.

As well as the Nature paper, it's worth checking out the current Insect Molecular Biology, which has a bunch of freely accessible papers related to the genome.

Besides all the 'how does sociality evolve, and what does it mean for humans' stuff, bees are important, and threatened, providers of ecosystem services. When the genome was completed last year, I had a piece in the Financial Times about this; I'm putting up the director's cut below.

Until last week, I didn't know that bumble bees were also commerically traded and transported, and that this similarly helped to spread disease. Then I saw this paper in the current issue of Population Ecology.

Anyway, here's the FT piece. Science made cool also posted on this issue recently.

A plague has swept the world. Thousands of communities have been infected and wiped out. We are trying to fight back with chemicals and quarantine, but it's a rearguard action, and the threat of a new epidemic is always lurking.

But this isn't Sars or Aids. The victims are honeybees. Across the world, beekeepers are battling with a menagerie of parasites and diseases, trying to stay one step ahead of existing threats, while remaining alert for new scourges.

The honeybee genome recently completed by a team of US scientists gives bees' human allies a powerful tool. It's the first complete genome of any domesticated animal; for thousands of years we have selected bees for docile temperaments and high honey production. Now, scientists can look for the genes that will help bees fight off their ailments.

"I'm optimistic that we'll be able to breed bees resistant to a variety of diseases," says Jay Evans, a geneticist at the US Department of Agriculture's Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland. Dr Evans works on the bees' immune system, and is seeking ways to boost its power. He is also developing tools to diagnose sick bees, by looking for genes that are switched on when insects are sick or starving.

There's more at stake than just the sweet stuff on your breakfast toast. In the UK alone, bees' pollination of crops is estimated to be worth about £200 million - ten times the value of the honey they produce. Fewer bees would mean more expensive food. And the insects perform an unmeasurable service to our environment by pollinating wild plants.

Bees' most serious enemy is a millimetre-long mite called Varroa destructor. The mites suck the blood of adult and larval bees and transmit deadly viral infections. Without treatment, an infested hive is doomed. Beekeepers can control varroa with pesticides, but the mites are starting to evolve resistance.

Varroa originally lived in peaceful coesixtence with a far-eastern bee species. But a century ago it switched to western honeybees. Since then, varroa has spread around the world, reaching the US in 1987 and the UK in 1992, where more than 5,000 hives have been infected. The impact on wild bees has been devastating: "In Europe and North America there are virtually no wild honeybees left," says Dr Evans.

Bees have millions of years of experience of coping with diseases. But we have made them vulnerable, by moving bees around, bringing diseases into contact with hives that have no resistance to them, in the same way that Europeans exported smallpox to the New World. "The movement of bees has increased tremendously, and there's always a risk that you'll introduce an exotic parasite with an exotic virus," says Brenda Ball, who studies varroa at the Rothamsted Research Institute in Hertfordshire.

Rather than create GM bees, researchers will most likely use the genome to steer breeding programmes. The genes that control behaviour could be the key to producing parasite-proof honeybees, says Dr Ball. We know that some bees are more hygenic than others, in their ability to detect and destroy infected larvae, for example. The genome should help us find out how this is determined, and breed more vigilant animals. It could also help us work out how Asian bees are able to resist varroa.

The varroa mite might be beekeepers' worst nightmare, but it's far from the only one. In December the European Commission restricted bee imports, in a bid to keep out two other damaging parasites, a beetle and another mite. And the insects are also prey to a range of fungal and bacterial diseases.

Bees are vulnerable to disease for the same reasons that we are - they live in dense groups, where individuals are in constant contact. Such cities support pathogens and give them the chance to spread. This makes them good models for understanding human disease, and researchers are already testing bees' natural antibiotics to see if they could work against our own infections.

Exclusive offer

Uniquely in the blogosphere, El Gentraso makes its readers this pledge: to keep its thoughts about Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion to itself.

I came to eat, and stayed to learn

This Saturday, I went on a fungus foray and identification workshop on Hampstead Heath, run by Andy Overall of fungitobewith.org.

Beforehand, my main motivation was to gather enough wild mushrooms for a risotto, and to learn enough do the same under my own steam without dying or accidentally tripping. But by the end of the day, I was just as fired up by having had a whole world of biodiversity revealed to me, and also at having learned a new skill. (And we only got enough mushrooms for toast.)

If you look, there really are an immense number of fungi out there, and they’re beautiful. The prettiest ones we found were the sulphur tuft and the wood blewett (the photos don't do them justice). Also, staring at the ground intently really expands your world — Hampstead Heath went from being somewhere nice for a stroll to a universe

Two things struck me. The first is that, to an outsider, the abilities of a skilled naturalist seem almost magical. Andy, armed with years of experience and that marvellous pattern-recognition system known as the human brain, was able to name most species at sight. It's a huge privilege to see someone like that in action.

I would guess that even he might not know how he does it — I am reasonably good at identifying birds, but when someone asks you how you know that something is a heron, or a kestrel, the only answer I can give is that, having seen lots of herons or kestrels previously, perhaps in less ambiguous circumstances, I know one when I see one.

(A bird’s hard-to-define-but unmistakeable signature is what birders call jizz (or jiss, or giss; a quick google reveals that the web is hot with discussion on this topic). Fungi have much the same.)

But the second was how quickly, as a beginner, one accumulates knowledge. Before this, my fungus-identification abilities ended with fly agaric and giant puffball. But now, even though I’m a long way from being able to distinguish between the 100+ different British species of Mycena or Russula, I reckon I could — armed with Roger Phillips’ Mushrooms etc. — assign more than 90% of what I found to a genus.

I’ve also learnt — armed with Richard Mabey’s Food for Free ( a lovely book, although this edition isn't quite as nice as the one I first encountered, an old B&W hardback we found in a holiday cottage) — that the number of good-to-eat species is relatively small, and most are distinctive (no reason to be blasé about safety, of course). When you don’t know anything, you can learn a useful amount of something pretty quickly, and easily.

And, even though I’m no great shakes as a naturalist, it’s tremendously satisfying. It’d be nice if people thought of natural history knowledge as culturally valuable — if people thought that knowing what a hawthorn, or a red admiral, looks like were as important as knowing who wrote Hamlet, or what Pythagoras’ theorem is. It adds another dimension to your enjoyment of the outdoors and, presumably, it’d help us conserve wild plants and animals if more people could recognize them.

Another podcast

You can here me being interviewed here by Judyth Piazza of the Student Operated Press. This is a bit shorter than the Small World interview, and a bit less about the science and what's in the book and more about influences, motivation, and me, me, me.

Website working again (apparently)

www.inthebeatofaheart.com seems to be working again. It went down because I was having some trouble with domain transfer, hosting, and my own ignorance. I hope it'll stay there now, but if not, it shouldn't be gone for long, andwww.johnwhitfield.co.uk isn't going anywhere.

Website technical difficulties

My book's website www.inthebeatofaheart.com is down, owing to difficulties with transferring domain names. But the site is mirrored on www.johnwhitfield.co.uk. Will have the other url working ASAP.