Vulgarization

 I am a vulgarizer. That is, my science books are intended for ordinary intelligent people (the original Latin meaning of vulgar), not for other scientists. This is true for all five of my published books (see links at www.stanleyrice.com), and for the sixth book that is under contract. I have written very few journal papers for other scientists to read. Most of my journal articles have been about science education, that is, for students and teachers. The reward for me was not to hear from a fellow scientist, “Good paper!” but to hear from a high school student who wanted to do a project based on one of my American Biology Teacher papers. My eight magazine articles in Skeptical Inquirer were a humorous approach to literalist creationism. And, of course, this blog and my YouTube channel are for all of you, not just for scientists.

In France, where I now live, la vulgarisation is not a bad word. It describes the work of writers and Youtubeurs such as myself or, in France, Jamy Gourmaud (see my earlier essay) who want to make science not only comprehensible but exciting to non-scientists. Traditionally, in America, scientists were supposed to look down their noses at non-scientists, especially artists and musicians. That is, not only their professional advancement but their sense of self-worth relied on the number of scholarly books and papers they had written, even when nobody outside their field could read or understand them. Popular books didn’t count. Only peer-reviewed papers and books in your field of expertise counted.

Increasingly, fields of expertise grow narrower and narrower. Decades ago, many scientists read papers from many different fields of science. It wasn’t just astrophysicists who read Edwin Hubble’s paper about the red shift. But, in writing my new book, I ended up citing a paper that had been published in the Journal of Osteoarchaeology. Obviously, I found the paper only by the use of Google Scholar.

At the same time, younger scientists are becoming disillusioned by the restriction of their audiences. They, like me, not only enjoy reaching out to the rest of the world, but feel a sense of emptiness at not doing so.

Heather O’Leary, a young anthropology professor at the University of South Florida published a paper that she knew hardly anyone would read. It was about the effects of toxic algal blooms in the Gulf on the tourism economy. It was, as she described it, mostly just records of visitors saying, over and over, that they didn’t like the smell of dead fish. So she decided to set her research data to music. She asked a composition professor to write the music and the university band director to perform it. This met with a lot of enthusiasm. And, now that NPR has covered the story and embedded a link to the paper, she will probably get a hundred times as many readers as she would otherwise have reached.

The message behind the work is that climate change will, among many other things, kill a lot of fish and spoil beaches that would otherwise enhance the local economy. But if you listen to the music, which is more or less a transcription of her data, you will not get this message. It sounds to me like a hundred other modernistic musical works (and I was in bands for almost two decades). To me, it is much more fulfilling to write simple (some would say, simplified) books that will, in fact, leave readers with a better understanding of the world.

Viva la vulgarisation!

Why You Are Not a Prairie Dog: More Insights from Loren Eiseley

I have recently been reading essays by Loren Eiseley, a paleontologist of the middle twentieth century. His books, such as The Firmament of Time and The Immense Journey, were considered epics of popular science writing at the time they were published. Many of his essays are very well-written, and I recommend him to any of you who like classic nature writing.

One of his essays, The Slit, is about a time in which he went down into a cavern and dug out a mammal skull from shortly after the extinction of the dinosaurs. Primates, the order to which humans and other apes belong, started to diversify right after the dinosaurs became extinct. One of the directions that they diversified was into arboreal forms, living in the trees. And that is where most of them still are, except for baboons and people. Another direction was to live by burrowing in the ground out in the newly-spreading grasslands. These primates eventually became extinct. Why? It was probably because of another order of mammals that was evolving and diversifying at the same time: rodents, which includes prairie dogs and ground squirrels. [Here is a photo I took of a prairie dog in the Badlands of South Dakota in 2000.]

Very early in the Cenozoic Era, it was not clear which direction mammalian evolution might take. Out in open prairies, both primates and rodents diversified. But the rodents were more successful, driving the burrowing primates to extinction. Had things ended up just slightly differently, primates might have been primarily burrowing animals, rather than leaping around in trees. And humans might not have evolved.

Another insight I got from reading Eiseley was a possible contributing factor to human intelligence. Our big brains require a lot of oxygen, therefore a lot of blood vessels. Why did our lineage, starting with the amphibians, have such well-oxygenated brains? The answer might be that amphibians evolved not just in shallow water, not just in shallow fresh water, but in shallow fresh anoxic water, so that extra blood vessels were required to keep even their small brains alive. It was this extra vascularization that made the evolution of intelligent terrestrial vertebrates possible.

To me, this was an excellent example of how the slightest change in the course of events can make a huge difference in the evolutionary outcome.

Loren Eiseley and the Fifth Planet

I here continue to write about Loren Eiseley.

One of the finest pieces of nature writing was Eiseley’s essay, The Fifth Planet. Here is the idea. The asteroid belt used to be a planet, between Mars and Jupiter, a planet usually called Phaeton, that was somehow pulverized. Not being an astronomer, I have no idea if this idea is still taken seriously, though online sources dismiss this theory. But it would explain why meteorites, many of which are stray asteroids, are either metallic, like a planet’s core, or volcanic, like a planet’s surface.

But one astronomer, named Williams, took this theory even further. He believed that this planet would not only have had a core and a volcanic surface but would have had sedimentary rocks and maybe fossils. That is, he believed that a meteorite might fall sometime which contained a fossil bone. He was, therefore, an astronomical bone hunter. Most astronomers dismissed him. After all, on Earth, only an infinitesimally small portion of the rock is sedimentary. To find a meteorite with sedimentary rock, one would have to examine perhaps trillions of meteorites. Williams’s response: let’s get started. And to do so, Williams recruited as many citizen-scientists as possible, to track down these meteorites.

His passion went further. Williams thought that, if the vanished planet had life, then life must be almost everywhere in the universe. This would change our whole view of reality. It would mean that we do not live in a lonely universe.

Eiseley centered his essay on the fate of a rural sheep farmer, one of the citizen-scientists Williams recruited. The dry western deserts and grasslands are among the best places to see and locate meteorites in North America. The farmer absorbed the passion and made it his own. He gathered every bit of information he could about meteorites, filling his farmhouse with disorganized sheets of paper. But he eventually gave up the vision and burned his papers. Perhaps part of the reason was that he finally realized how great the odds were against finding an extraterrestrial bone fossil. But it was also the fact that the nuclear age destroyed his optimism about life in general.

Had Eiseley, or Williams, or the farmer, known about the Mars meteorite discovered in 1984 in Antarctica, and studied a few years later, they might have had more, or less, confidence in extraterrestrial life. The ALH84001 meteorite contained structures that might have been what on Earth would be called bacteria. Life, but not bones. Perhaps, then, complex life is vanishingly rare in the universe, even if there are bacteria-like forms all over the place. Perhaps Simon Conway Morris was right about evolution producing “inevitable humans in a lonely universe”.

This essay was one of the best pieces of science writing largely because it began and ended with the life of the rural farmer, who embraced a theory then had to dismally surrender it. The essay was not about the vanished planet, or the astronomer. It was about an ordinary man to whom science could be a source of inspiration and of pessimism. Readers want to read about the human side of science. As a science writer, I have to keep this in mind.

Does Anyone Remember Loren Eiseley?

I here begin a short series of essays about the mid-twentieth-century paleontologist and science writer Loren Eiseley. Does anyone remember him?

The thing I remember most about him was something that I cannot find on the web. He had a Saturday morning program, right in the middle of the cartoons, in which he provided tours of the Smithsonian museum. It was usually their natural history collections, something he knew a lot about, but I remember one of the programs was about the paintings of George Catlin, which depicted Native American life before the tribes were conquered and degraded by Europeans and later by white Americans. I was particularly struck by the (to me) new concept of biodiversity. So many species! I had started a bird list, and I knew there were lots of species of plants as well. But millions? I imagined that every species of organism in the world had its own sheet of paper, all of them gathered together in a filing cabinet at the Smithsonian, and that the deep-voiced Loren Eiseley had the key to it.

Eiseley wrote many, many essays, mostly about his feelings in response to scientific discoveries. Each essay was insightful, and a few of them were masterpieces, about which I write in the next few entries.

One of Eiseley’s insights was that each organism understands only a small part of the real universe. One of Eiseley’s favorite examples was the garden spider. He could walk right up and look at it. It ignored him, because its universe consisted of the insects that landed on its web and finding a mate. To the spider, Eiseley the man was inconceivable. Another example was the “inner galaxy” of white blood cells, which gave their lives to protect us from infection, but they did not even know they were inside of a human body. Maybe our view of reality is as limited by our biology as the views, if they can be so called, of spiders and white blood cells.

Science helps us understand ourselves, but our understanding is always determined largely by our cultural context. That is, we use scientific facts to portray ourselves the way our culture sees us.  As Eiseley wrote in The Inner Galaxy, “In one [historical] period angels hover over our birth, in the following time we are planetary waifs, the product of a meaningless and ever-altering chemistry. We exchange haloes in one era for fangs in another. Our religious and philosophical conceptions change so rapidly that the theological and moral exhortations of one decade become the wastepaper of the next epoch. The ideas for which millions yielded up their lives produce only bored yawns in a later generation.” This happens, whether we see ourselves as created or as the products of evolution.

Eiseley wrote at a time when the scientific as well as the popular conception of evolution was very different from what it is today. For example, he wrote about Boskop Man, which he considered to be a separate lineage from ours, but one in which brain growth and the reduction of facial features—that is, becoming more childlike as adults—had occurred as a separate evolutionary experiment. We consider our pedomorphic species to have the assurance of success; but an entirely separate lineage of humans was even more pedomorphic than we are, bigger-brained than anyone alive today, and became extinct. Nice insight, but it is no longer considered valid; Boskop people were simply a population of modern humans related to the South African San people.

The dominant view was that evolution leads inevitably upward. If, as many believed at the time Eiseley wrote, evolution was about the improvement of species, then this view followed directly. But an individual view of natural selection now shows us that people who are most successful at getting their genes propagated will become more common, even if this causes the society or species to degrade. Eiseley, not considering the ascendency of evil people and the decline of human societies to be consistent with evolution, came up with a different word, a word that never caught on: involution. Human society, he seemed to believe, operated contrary to evolution.

One of the things that Eiseley hated the most was the “deliberate blunting of wonder.” Many scientists did this, by assuming the natural world was only the operation of physical laws. But so did many religious people, who saw the world as merely a stage for the battle between God and the devil; many political leaders, who saw the world as an opportunity for power; and commercial interests, who saw the world as mere resources. If any word can describe Eiseley’s writings, it is wonder.

His was some of the most beautiful science writing, even if it is not technically correct. It is not surprising that he edited a literary journal (PrairieSchooner) before he became a professional paleontologist. Here is an example, from The Firmament of Time:

“Since the first human eye saw a leaf in Devonian sandstone and a puzzled finger reached to touch it, sadness has lain over the heart of man. By this tenuous thread of living protoplasm, stretching backward into time, we are linked forever to lost beaches whose sands have long since hardened into stone. The stars that caught our blind amphibian stare have shifted far or vanished in their courses, but still that naked, glistening thread winds onward. No one knows the secret of its beginning or its end. Its forms are phantoms. The thread alone is real: the thread of life.”

Eiseley got a fair amount of criticism at the time he wrote. This bothered but did not stop him. After all, today, who is remembered most: Eiseley, or his critics? More entries on Loren Eiseley to follow.

The Human Age

I have been reading Diane Ackerman’s The Human Age. As usual, I read good books several years after they come out.

The point of Diane Ackerman’s book is that humans have completely transformed the Earth to such an extent that no place is truly natural—nor is there, perhaps, any place that is entirely artificial. Humans have so completely transformed so much of the Earth that even the places we seemingly have not touched are now different, for example by global warming. But at the same time, all kinds of species have “invaded” the human landscape, whether transported by humans such as many invasive species (starlings from Europe, for example) or simply by exploring their way into our cities (as with coyotes downtown in cities).

Ackerman must be the world’s best science writer (in English, anyway). Try these quotes:

About urbanization: ...like splattered balls of mercury whose droplets have begun flowing back together, we’re finally merging into a handful of colossal, metal-clad spheres of civilization.

[The sun] reaches into the mumbling corners of our private universe, spurs growth, sheds light on all our episodes and exploits, transfigures daily life. Its edible rays feed the green plants on land and sea, which animals graze upon, and we dine upon in turn, and so it quivers through our blood. Every molecule of our being, every mote inside us, every atom and eave in the mansion of the body and the penumbra of the mind was forged in some early chaos of a sun.

And finally: Sometimes it seems as if Gaia were so pissed off she finally decided to erase her workmanship, atomizing the whole shebang and flicking our Blue Marble back into the mouth of the supernovas where our metals were first forged.

Years ago, someone who wrote a blurb for the jacket of my second book compared my writing to hers. Only now, upon reading Ackerman for the first time, do I realize what a compliment that was.

Much of Ackerman’s book is filled with small- or large-scale success stories of people who have capitalized upon the increasing desire among humans to reduce our impact on the Earth. She seems particularly impressed by natural buildings and vertical farming. All of this optimism is set against a background of terror, that humans are changing the Earth so much that we will no longer be able to fit our civilization into it, but she doesn’t talk about this very much. It is never very far, however, from the reader’s mind.

It was certainly never very far from my mind as I read the book. I was helping to supervise my ten-month-old granddaughter, who is exhaustingly cheerful. She loves exploring, or having attention paid to her, or being left alone to bang on things, and (we are lucky) she even likes most foods. She must have some incredible smile-muscles. And I kept thinking over and over about what kind of world she will encounter, a world messed up by earlier generations. It is not just my love for nature that makes me write and teach about environmental issues. I can always see her silhouette against our picture window with a view of flowers and leaves whenever I teach or write.