Evolution 2011: The Altruism-Fest, part two

One of the most popular of the participants in the Evolution 2011 meetings at Norman, Oklahoma was not even a human. She was a killdeer.

Killdeer are plovers (birds) whose nests are simple depressions on the ground. Their eggs are spotted, and the mothers choose splotchy-colored brownish places to lay their eggs (see photograph). Killdeer have been extremely successful, and are found along the edges of parking lots over much of North America. You have probably seen them, running along very fast, with white fronts and two black bars on their breasts, and calling out “killdeer, killdeer.”

A mother killdeer made her nest in the mulch near the parking lot at the convention center where Evolution 2011 took place. I parked my car right next to it a few times. When a human first approaches, the mother killdeer starts calling, then spreads her wings to threaten the intruder (see photograph). Then she runs off a few meters away, falls on her side, and exposes inner feathers in such a way that she appears to be injured. This behavior may draw the attention of the intruder away from the nest and toward the mother bird, who is pretending to be an easy piece of meat to catch. If the intruder approaches her, she runs off a little further and repeats the process.

As the mother killdeer was putting on her show and making a lot of noise, right as many attendees were leaving for lunch, a little crowd gathered around my car to watch and marvel. They were marveling at one of the most interesting examples of altruism.

The mother bird is putting her life at risk to protect her eggs. But it is worth the risk, because when the little birds hatch, they will carry many of her genes into the next generation. The evolutionary principles—kin selection and inclusive fitness—are east to understand, but always marvelous to behold.

I am the author of Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, recently published by Prometheus Books. See my website for more information.

Evolution 2011: The Altruism-Fest, part one

I recently returned from the Evolution 2011 meetings in Norman, Oklahoma. I previously described the excitement of learning about new research into evolutionary science. I now want to analyze the meeting as an example of altruism.

The papers and posters that were presented at the meeting were important, but the information in these presentations can be obtained from journals and online sources. There is no need for scientists and students to gather from all over the world just to get information. What is most important at meetings such as this is that evolutionary scientists get together to discuss one another’s work and benefit from one another’s criticism and encouragement.

In some meetings, scientists like to criticize one another’s papers; in particular, they like to criticize the papers presented by grad students and postdocs of their rivals. My sense is that this has become less common in recent years, and I saw none of it at the Evolution 2011 meetings. The entire atmosphere was encouragement and dialogue. I did not witness any verbal attacks, even when some of the presentations were clearly amateurish projects. Those projects will never get published, but we all considered it important to encourage the young investigators who did them. I think it is safe to say that all of the young graduate (and undergraduate) students who presented their work went away with encouragement for their dedication and intelligence. I made a special effort to praise instances of particularly good work by graduate students.

In other words, Evolution 2011 was not so much a gathering of competitors as it was an altruism-fest. Altruism is when animals do nice things for other animals in the same species, and benefit as a result of it. An altruism-fest is quite different from what critics of evolution might expect an evolution meeting to be. Creationist critics consider evolution to result from bloody fights and the law of the jungle, and they openly declare (as I showed in my March blog entries) that evolution leads to slavery and holocaust. If you can judge people by what they do more than by what they say, then it is clear that altruism is a prominent feature of modern evolutionary science. Evolutionary scientists freely share ideas, and develop bonds of friendship, even when these bonds offer no immediate promise of reciprocal benefit.

Of course, it was not all altruism. It was also a chance for graduate students to increase their visibility in the job market. All of the presentations used PowerPoint and most of them had clever illustrations that made their main points easily understandable. Many were humorous and many had imbedded video footage. The sessions functioned like leks, which are gatherings of male animals showing off while females walk around and check them out. Only in this case, the showing off was not reproductive but intellectual, and the presenters and observers were equally men and women. I do not get the sense that evolutionary biology has very much male bias anymore.

Not only is evolutionary science alive and well, but so is altruism. And where do you find it? As much at a meeting of evolutionary scientists as at a meeting of preachers, perhaps more so; and certainly more than at a meeting of businessmen and women or diplomats.

I did not stay for the banquet. Altruistically, I gave away my banquet ticket to a postdoc from Siberia. I expected nothing in return, but I believe I live in a better world in which I contribute to the general ocean of altruism. While everyone else was having their banquet in Norman, I was eating breaded frog legs at a Chinese buffet in Okmulgee. Frog legs at a Chinese buffet? Only in Oklahoma.

And, as described in the next blog entry, not all of the altruism at these meetings was human.

I am the author of Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, recently published by Prometheus Books. See my website for more information.

Evolution 2011: Evolution is Alive and Well

I have just returned from the Evolution 2011 meetings in Norman, Oklahoma. This is the pre-eminent meeting of evolutionary scientists in the world, sponsored by the Society for the Study of Evolution, the American Society of Naturalists, and the Society for Systematic Biology. Anyone who thinks that evolutionary science is based on very little evidence should experience the flood of data reported at the Evolution meetings every year. All over the world and in every group of organisms, the evidence continues to pour in that evolution is occurring all around us and has been occurring for billions of years. Those of us who have been around longer took special effort to encourage the graduate students and postdocs who have done amazing and creative research.

I will briefly mention three of the graduate student papers that I found particularly interesting.

Sarah Ann Bodbyl Roels (University of Kansas) conducted an experiment in which bees selected floral traits in a monkeyflower species for several generations. Both the treatment and control were inside of identical greenhouses, with the bumblebee hive inside one of the greenhouses. This is a particularly good example of experimental design.

Carolina Bonin (Scripps Institute, La Jolla) obtained DNA samples from seals near Antarctica to determine patterns of paternity in a population that had been driven nearly to extinction. Getting DNA from a male seal is not an easy task; you have to run up with a sample vial on a pole, poke the male to get a blood sample, and run like hell as the male flops along after you. Impressive work.

I was most impressed with the work of Kelsey Byers (University of Washington), who has figured out which chemicals stimulate the bumblebees that pollinate monkeyflowers. She did this by inserting electrodes into the exposed brains of bumblebees, and measuring electrical stimulation in response to different volatile chemical components of nectar. This is a very creative approach to the study of pollination.

The meeting was also an opportunity for people from all over the world to talk about what is happening on the creation/evolution front. Oklahoma is perhaps the world epicenter of creationism, and visitors from other countries wanted to know what is going on here. In the photograph, Vic Hutchison (the grand old man of evolution education in Oklahoma) talked with foreign students Bjorn Ostman (originally from Denmark) and Olga Dolgova (originally from Vladivostok, Siberia) about the evolutionary political scene in America.

Organizing this meeting and making sure that everything happened on time for the hundreds of participants was a big job, and I want to thank Rich Broughton, Larry Weider, and Ingo Schlupp, all faculty members at the University of Oklahoma, for their amazing work in making this meeting a success.

I will post two more entries about the Evolution 2011 meetings.

I am the author of Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, recently published by Prometheus Books. See my website for more information.