Blood Brain Barrier: Stories from the Borderlands of Science, story 5. Rock Bunnies

This collection of short stories by Stan Rice, who is also the author of nonfiction books of popular science and science novels, takes the reader to the frontier between science and worlds of the impossible. Readers of my science blog will appreciate the creative telling of scientifically impossible stories; readers of my religion blog will appreciate the question of whether, even if these things were possible, would they be good?

The stories in this collection are The Man Who Could Work Miracles, Light Apparel, Flow of Blood, Wisdom Builds Her House (all reviewed earlier in this blog), Rock Bunnies (reviewed here), Entropy, Olga the Science Cat, Doghouse, and Fresh Air.

In Rock Bunnies, once again, Rice takes an idea from the fiction of H. G. Wells, in this case from The Time Machine. In Wells’s novel, the human species has evolved into two: the infantile Eloi and the shabby but hard-working Morlocks, as different as any two animal species. In Rice’s story, the Urbanites are rich white technologists who have evolved into a slightly-different race that lives in artificial cities, while the dark poor Rock Bunnies live in places the whites have destroyed. This story is set in the Black Hills, which (as anyone visiting Mt. Rushmore knows) is currently covered with pine trees, but in this story, set in the future, is a desert. The Rock Bunnies leap from cliff to cliff and live off of mountain goats and little clumps of edible wild plants.

A white Urbanite graduate student out in the desert sees a Rock Bunny who, as they almost never do, fall from a cliff and injure herself, perhaps mortally. He wants to rescue her but her fellow Rock Bunny vandals have destroyed his car, and he becomes their captive. The Rock Bunny woman, however, is the niece of their chief. They develop a friendship, and the chief—whom they call the Scientist, because he keeps the spirit of science alive among his people—wants the white man to stay with them as his son-in-law.

In this view of the future, which is otherwise bleak, Rice shows that this tribe of Rock Bunnies reveres science and its practitioners. Nice fantasy.

An Urbanite helicopter comes and finds the white man. The white man assumes it is to rescue him. In this, he is quite wrong.

As in other stories in this collection, Rice makes a strong case that altruism—the evolutionary basis of love—is the most important human adaptation. This is the message of both science and religion. As in many other Rice stories, there is also the theme of racism.

Will We Lose Even the Remembrance of Biodiversity?

And now, time to get really depressed.

In the July 30 essay, I  speculated about the loss of biodiversity in a future world, producing a natural world that may more resemble my Garden of Contemplation than a rainforest. In this essay, I speculate about not just the loss of biodiversity, but the loss of the remembrance of biodiversity.

Dedicated scientists have recorded over a million species of organisms on Earth. You can find many of them on the Encyclopedia of Life website. In Oklahoma, we have a vascular plants database. Most of these species remain unknown to anyone except scientists. Photographs of many of them appear on calendars sent out by conservation organizations, but for most of us, we look at the photos and then forget the species. I tried to keep all of my old conservation calendars, but it was an impossible task. Information in a huge pile of old calendars or Nature Conservancy magazines is as inaccessible as if it were hidden away in a vault. Only a few experts really know the truth about biodiversity. If you put me in a room and told me to list all of the plant species in Oklahoma, of which there are thousands, I would run out at about 300. There might be two people in Oklahoma (Amy and Bruce, that’s you) who might know all of them. And in a rainforest? The fabled acre of rainforest in Peru that has more species of birds than all of Europe? Only a few experts know what those species are. For the rest of us, it is hearsay.

These species are rapidly becoming extinct. And one of the reasons is global climate change, resulting from carbon emissions for which the coal and oil industries are largely responsible. People want solar and wind energy; but the coal and oil industries, and the United States government which they own, do not. Furthermore, the coal and oil industries want to be self-righteous. They want us, and future generations, to admire them, even to love them. Therefore, it is imperative that future generations NOT know about these extinctions for which the corporations are partially responsible.

In my imagination, I foresee a future in which databases of species, many of which will by then be extinct, will be purged. Paper backups—including scientific papers, which few people read even now—can be locked away and kept from public knowledge. The Republican government, by then a dictatorship, can then proclaim to the world, “We are not responsible for the sixth mass extinction. There never was one! The species that you see today are the only ones that were on the Earth before we began releasing energy from fossil fuels. And anyone who accuses us of causing a mass extinction, of destroying God’s creation, is a liar and an enemy of the state! An enemy of God! Anyone who says a mass extinction occurred, show us the data! You cannot! It does not exist! We cannot have harmed God’s creation; we Republicans are God’s people!” I will leave it to you to guess whether such a scenario might ever happen. What is more likely is that biodiversity information will simply be forgotten, even as it sits in digital piles.

A couple of decades ago I wrote a short story set in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where I used to teach field botany in the summer. In the story, what had once been forests of ponderosa pine had eroded into an artificial desert. People lived in walled cities with artificial resources. Except for some wild people called rock bunnies because they jumped from one rock to another. The rock bunnies had found, and hidden, a herbarium that showed that not only pines but many species of wildflowers from lilies to shooting-stars had once lived there, and birches had once grown along clear brooks.

(This photo from 1994 shows a student named Lily holding a lily in a meadow at the top of the Black Hills, here in Wyoming.)

In the story, many of the herbarium specimens had been collected long before by a long-forgotten teacher named Stanley Rice. A military contingent from one of the cities destroyed the herbarium, since the central government wanted everyone to think that the eroded landscape had always been there, and that they had caused no environmental degradation.

To those of you who think this speculation may be extreme: can you prove me wrong? Can you deny that the current Republican leadership, under its charismatic antichrist Donald Trump, create their own “truths”? How is a student in the year 2080 to know that hundreds of thousands of species that they have never seen, and that their government does not acknowledge, exist or existed?

Those of us who are documenting biodiversity—might our work, someday, be considered treasonous?

I just posted a new video in which Darwin explains biogeography, from a beautiful and educational setting: The Black Hills of South Dakota!

My Fun Evolution Trip Part Six: Adaptations and Stories

We saw a couple of really interesting plant adaptations in the Black Hills. The first is the white buttercup, which filled some of the shallow ponds of Little Spearfish Creek.

The underwater leaves were finely dissected, which increases their surface area for absorbing dissolved carbon dioxide. Terrestrial leaves could also absorb more carbon dioxide this way but would lose too much water, which is not a problem for an aquatic plant. The flowers, however, float on top of the water where insects can find and pollinate them.

Another set of adaptations is represented by the quaking aspen, Populus tremuloides. When you see a whole clump of aspens, perhaps covering several acres, it may be a single genetic individual that has spread by underground stems. All of the aboveground stems are the same height. The resulting genetic uniformity has its risks: diseases can spread rapidly not only because of the genetic monoculture but because of whichever underground connections may remain intact. But the connections help to stabilize the massive clone: the stems (ramets) growing in favorable locations can help to support the ramets growing in unfavorable locations, very much like the phalanx of an army. Many plants have this adaptation, but aspens are famous because they have such massive clonal growth.

Other aspen adaptations sound more like just-so stories. The first is the ability of their leaves (as well as those of cottonwoods, which are in the same genus) to quake in the slightest breath of wind. They do this because of their flat petioles. The standard explanation is that this allows the leaves to absorb more carbon dioxide. I am confident that this is true, but I can only ask why, if quaking is such a wonderful adaptation, that more plants do not employ it?

The second is a nearly unique bark adaptation. The bark looks greenish and is capable of carrying out photosynthesis. Underneath a tight white layer of tissue, there is an intensely green layer, at least in the Black Hills populations. Apparently the photosynthesis in this layer is less inhibited by cold temperatures than in leaves and might benefit the tree in early spring or late autumn. I could not readily find references about what aspens might do with the sugar their bark produces; perhaps they load it directly into the adjacent phloem and send it down to the roots and underground stems. Apparently this layer was actively producing sugar, for an ant quickly found the shallow wound that I made in the bark.

I do not doubt the value of the adaptation, but once again I ask, if it is such a great adaptation, why don’t other trees have it? Of course, many young stems do have it. We cut down a mulberry tree in our yard, which was inconveniently disturbing the foundation of our house, and hundreds of thick green stems immediately sprouted back. Even older mulberry stems have a green layer—but not, to my knowledge, the trunks, as in aspen.

I would think that green trunks, like quaking leaves, would be easy to evolve, and should be more common, if our facile adaptive just-so stories were entirely correct. It appears to me that a few plants have evolved great adaptations within evolutionary constraints.

My Fun Evolution Trip Part Four: East Meets West in the Black Hills

The Black Hills is also a good place to study biogeography. While no place is as good as Wallace’s line in modern Indonesia, you might find the Black Hills of South Dakota to be more accessible.

The Black Hills (so named because the ponderosa pines look black from a distance) are a small mountain range that formed separately from other nearby ranges and hills, such as the Bear Lodge Mountains, Bighorns, and Bear Butte. They are entirely separate from, and a hundred miles east of, the Rockies. The Rockies form a rough dividing line of eastern from western species: they have mostly western species. But the Black Hills has a mixture of eastern and western species. This is a perfect illustration of biogeography over evolutionary time. The species that migrated from the west include:

·         Ponderosa pines (Pinus ponderosa)

·         Limber pines (Pinus flexilis)

·         Many wildflower species

·         Violet-green swallows

·         Bighorn sheep

·         Mountain goats

It is obvious from this list that I know more about plants than about animals.

But other species migrated from the east. Western North America has tree species such as the Fremont poplar and many of its own species of oaks, but in the Black Hills you will find:

·         Bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa)

·         Eastern cottonwood (Populus deltoides)

This makes sense because bur oak can survive in prairies and is the most likely oak of all eastern species to have migrated westward across the prairie, and cottonwoods migrated from the east along creeks and rivers.

Other species migrated in from the north:

·         White spruce (Picea glauca)

·         Paperbark birch (Betula papyrifera)

·         Quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides)

·         Twinflower (Linnaea borealis)

I can scarcely refrain from posting all of the dozens of birch bark photos I took.

Some tree species can be found in virtually every state, such as boxelder (Acer negundo).

Some of these species are mere remnants of larger populations in other areas. For example, other mountain goat populations are not found within about a hundred kilometers of the Black Hills.

Not only have species migrated to the Black Hills, but some of them can only be understood as remnants from the last ice age. Thousands of white spruces persist in the Black Hills, but mostly in creek bottoms and on north-facing slopes in the higher, northern part of the Hills. As the weather became warmer and drier after the last ice age, the spruces retreated uphill while the ponderosa pines moved in. The limber pines are found in only a tiny population near Harney Peak, the highest point in the Hills, also retreating from the warming, drying climate.

The Black Hills is also a good place to observe microclimates. The wet birch forests along the creeks have lots of ferns and violets. Immediately upslope, you can find ponderosa pines on the dry rocky slopes. In thin soil on top of the rocks you can find cactus, while in the moist cracks of the very same rocks you can find small ferns. Perhaps best of all, in the bogs near Black Fox campground, as in many other acidic bogs in coniferous forests of northern North America, you can find a little birch shrub with small leaves, the bog birch Betula glandulosa.

You can also notice geographic patterns within species in the Black Hills. I am accustomed to seeing three to five leaflets on Oklahoma box elders, but in the Black Hills they mostly have five to seven leaflets.

Biogeography is like a mystery novel in which you try to figure out where everything came from over evolutionary time. I recommend the Black Hills for a biogeography adventure.

My Fun Evolution Trip Part Three: The Great Unconformity of the Black Hills

One of the greatest new insights into the history of the Earth was when James Hutton realized that the Earth had to be very old and that geological deposits were recycled over and over again—an idea called uniformitarianism. Hutton was not the first person to think of this but he was the first to pursue the idea in an organized fashion. His complex thoughts were later summarized by John Playfair and extended by Charles Lyell. As the modern paleontologist Michael Benton has explained, uniformitarianism can mean lots of things, some of which (such as uniformity of process) is still accepted by modern scientists, but others of which (such as uniformity of rate) are not. The former means that you can understand the past by studying the processes of the present, rather than invoking random miracles. The latter means that those processes have operated as slowly in the past as they are at present, which is clearly not the case.

Hutton, loving near Edinburgh, Scotland, in the late eighteenth century, looked at the local geological deposits and thought about them. At Siccar Point is an unconformity with nearly vertical Silurian sedimentary layers on the bottom and gently sloping Devonian and Carboniferous sedimentary layers on top, with millions of years of missing history in between. He realized that such sedimentary deposits could not have formed all at once during a global flood. And here’s why.

When the older, lower sedimentary layers formed, they had to be horizontal, due to the law of gravity. But these layers had been turned on their sides. If they were still mud when turned sideways, they would have gone PHHHHHHT! and squished into a big pile. The fact that they retained their layers meant that they had become rock before being turned on their sides. Then other sedimentary layers formed on top of them. This simply could not have happened during a single global Flood of Noah. Of course, creationists then as now could simply invoke miracles. They could say that God squished the lower layers into rock and turned them on their sides in the middle of the Flood. Does the Bible say this? No, they just make it up.

You can go to Scotland and see it for yourself. Sounds to me like a great excuse to go to Scotland. But there are other formations called The Great Unconformity, including the one John Wesley Powell discovered in the Grand Canyon. An unconformity is a geological formation in which a large chunk of time is missing. But there is a really good one (which didn’t make it into the Wikipedia entry) in the Black Hills of South Dakota, which has Precambrian sediments raised at a 70 degree angle on the bottom, and horizontal Cambrian strata on top, with almost two billion years of missing strata.

It is difficult to get directions to find it. So remember this. Find Nemo Road west of Rapid City. There are several ways to get there. Just as soon as this road, as you go west, crosses over the line from Pennington County into Meade County, you will see a bridge over Boxelder Creek. Immediately to your left is the Great Unconformity.

This is what it looks like from Nemo Road:

Even though it is in Black Hills National Forest, there are private landholdings all around, so you need to stay away from people’s yards. You will probably find, as I did, a path worn through the grass by generations of geology students from the South Dakota School of Mines and Wheaton College Science Station. There are other places to see the unconformity, but this is the only place where you can walk right up to it and put your finger on almost two billion years of missing history.

How could this unconformity have formed all at once during a flood? But maybe creationists have another explanation. Maybe the lower Precambrian layers were pre-Flood, which would have given ample time (almost two thousand years) to form the sediments into rock and then push them to their current 70 degree angle, and then the upper sediments were of Flood origin. This approach is not much help, however, because two thousand years is not enough time to have turned all the Precambrian sediments into rock and pushed them over, unless God did a miracle which the Bible conveniently does not mention.

So when you are in the Black Hills, forget about Deadwood and even Mt. Rushmore. The only really interesting thing, to me, about Mt. Rushmore, is the remnant populations of the rare fern Asplenium septentrionale that someone showed me in 1993 but which have apparently died. Go see the Great Unconformity, a hidden treasure—there is not even a road sign to mark the Nemo Road location.