DARWIN

Chapter IV: Natural Selection: Or the Survival of the Fittest

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 13:56:00 -0700

Darwin noticed: “What natural selection cannot do, is to modify the structure of one species, without giving it any advantages, for the good of another species: and though statements to this effect may be found in works of natural history, I cannot find one case which will bear investigation.”

In other words, says Darwin, animals and plants were not put on Earth solely for exploitation by humankind. This is not our kingdom. Again, nothing inherently anti-deity in this but in a way rather yogic — the universe unfolds as it unfolds. We can only select whatever characteristics a given species is born with — even if it pleases us, we cannot turn donkeys into singers.

In this chapter Darwin sounds passionate. He’s spent the past three chapters dissecting the domestication process, giving example after example of how humans select domestic animals, almost lulling the reader into a state of wonder at how clever we are when it comes to manipulating plants and animals. Then “Blammo!” We’re good, Darwin says, but Nature is better. Nature acts on unseen advantages, such as organs, senses, “on the whole machinery of life.” An unfortunate use of words, machinery echoes Descartes’ idea that non-human animals were machines, devoid of mind and consciousness. I’ll come back to this, but it does imply animals have no agency.

Darwin defends his use of the term Natural Selection: because metaphors are an important way to express ideas, it’s difficult not personifying nature. Yes, the “select” implies agency but “whoever objected to chemists speaking of the elective affinities of the various elements?” Darwin writes. Mercury is not an active element, to combine it with other elements takes effort. Does that mean mercury is lazy? Anti-social? Hydrogen combines with every element in the Periodic Table (except for the non-metal group). Does that make hydrogen promiscuous? If you’re a writer, yes, hydrogen hooks up with just about anybody — it’s effective to describe distinctly non-human objects or beings in human terms — readers understand ideas better that way. But the metaphors writers use influence readers’ thinking.

Darwin explains that Natural Selection refers to the “aggregate action and product of many natural laws” adding that more familiarity with his theory, means more acceptance of the terminology. But there’s a cogntiive dissonance here with what Darwin wants us to understand as Natural Selection and how he describes it. It’s a process with no thought behind it and yet is infinitely superior to what the the most “thoughtful” animal on the planet can do, plus, the words he uses to describe the selection of traits — “a good” mutation or “bad” mutation — or even to the phrase “the survival of the fittest,” implies life, whatever the life form, has value. Humans never accept machines as having the same value as life.

So let’s go back to Descartes and the idea of animals as complex organic machines. It leaves no room in Western thought for a world view that includes agency on the part of every life form in an ecosystem and recognizing that is actually key to a healthy ecological relationship when the top predator has enormous advantages (brain power.) Giving life forms agency might be a functional way to protect an ecosystem from overexploitation. Without the ability to assess and do something about, oh, say climate change, we may as well be just a supercolony of ants. (Maybe we really are.) By robbing other creatures of agency, a culture gives itself permission to take indefinitely.

Loch Ness Monster & Creationism

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 09:19:35 -0700

A Louisiana school uses the example of Nessie, the “elusive” monster in Loch Ness that draws tourists to the lake town of Inverness, as proof that humans and dinosaurs existed at the same time, poking a whole in Darwin’s evolutionary theory. How can they not understand that this is a long-running hoax?

To take a page from my book Hoaxed!:

Every now and then over the past 800 years, Scotland’s Loch Ness monster pops up and startles some unsuspecting passerby. So, pick a Nessie hoax, any hoax — a filmed Nessie, a photographed Nessie…how about a fossilized Nessie?

In 2000, Gerald McSorley was walking around Loch Ness when he accidentally tripped and fell into the lake, landing on a fossil. Was it Nessie? The fossil was turned over to the National Museum of Scotland where a paleontologist took a close look. The fossilized neck bones were embedded in limestone, a kind of rock not found in Loch Ness. And the fossil showed signs of being immersed in salt water, not fresh water. Plus, Loch Ness was formed about 15 000 years ago while the fossil, of a marine plesiosaur, was about 155 million years old.

The fossil wasn’t Nessie, it was probably planted there by a hoaxer. But Nessie lives on, if not in the lake, at least in peoples’ imaginations.

Hoaxed photo of the Loch Ness monster from 21 April 1934.

Yetis in Siberia....Seriously?

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 09:01:00 -0700

So much is wrong with this article….where to start? Synopsis: A Yeti footprint is found in an area of Siberia known for being a Yeti hotspot. (Can you spell t-o-u-r-i-s-m?) Apparently hairs were found and they are identical to hairs found in four different places around the world. Identical how? A “well-known” scientist with the latest equipment (which is…?) will release results in December about his analysis of purported Yeti remains from Switzerland. He has a plea on a website asking for more remains. It’s a hoax.

www.philippe-semeria.com

Scopes, May 25, 1925....Nurture or Nature?

Fri, 25 May 2012 14:16:17 -0700

Today is the day when a grand jury indicted Tennessee schoolteacher John T. Scopes for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Scopes violated a state law banning teaching a theory that does not include God’s hand in the existence of all life.

The teacher — a physics and math teacher — was only filling in as biology teacher. But he was young, 24, and when asked by the American Civil Liberties Union to “furnish the body for the defendant’s chair,” Scopes agreed.

Looking at the photo though, he was just 24?! This snippet from his memoir sums up why he was such a cool, progressive guy:

“I was born, a child of this strange century, on August 3, 1900, in Paducah, Kentucky, an Ohio River town that was a symbol of the live-and-let-live philosophy that I was taught at home.”

Climate Change and the Brown Argus Butterfly

Thu, 24 May 2012 11:54:31 -0700

Darwin wrote about species and their relationships with each other as a crucial part of natural selection. And new research shows the brown argus butterfly — pretty scarce in its habitat in the UK in the 1980s — has branched out, exploiting what was once a fickle relationship with other plants. In the past, the butterfly relied heavily on rockrose (Helianthemum nummarlium), a plant that grows on warm, sunny south-facing slopes (they’re beautiful in the garden since they bloom all summer.)

But in the past 20 years warmer temperatures have made plants in another family, the Geraniaceae family, more favourable hosts for the butterfly’s eggs. Couple that with butterfly phenotypes that happily bypass rockrose to lay their eggs on dove’s foot cranesbill plants, and the fact that the butterflies are also probably escaping established enemies in the rockrose sites, and brown argus butterfly populations have moved 79 kilometres north in Great Britain.

[Brown argus butterfly, courtesy Louise Mair]

The de-evolution of British gallantry...

Sun, 20 May 2012 11:01:00 -0700

On a British ship, a woman is less likely to survive if it goes down — whether or not the captain gives a Women and Children First order. A working paper investigating maritime disasters and comparative survival rates of women, men, and children revealed that if you’re a woman and you want to travel by boat, choose a non-British ship.

Researchers analyzed 18 maritime disasters spanning three centuries. Their other conclusions: women’s survival rates have risen along with their status in society since the First World War, children fare poorly no matter what, and the duration of the disaster (a ship going down slowly allows social norms to dictate behaviour) has no association with social norms. When disaster strikes, the researchers write, it really is every man for himself.

To sleep: perchance to dream...or slow down rabies

Sat, 19 May 2012 09:16:56 -0700

The rabies virus evolves more quickly in bats that live in the tropics versus those that live in temperate zones. The difference? Sleep. Well, technically hibernation. Heat-loving bats have more opportunities to spread the virus since they’re active 24/7/12 (12 being months.) In temperate zones, bats hibernate for up to six months. That translates into fewer virus transmission, and reduced evolution.

Original study

Greek farmers arrive in Sweden, spread technology, genes, but what about the feta?

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 11:12:52 -0700

From DNA analysis of ancient burials in Sweden, scientists think they’ve clinched it: farming spread from southern Europe to northern Europe, via farmers migrating in and intermingling.

By teasing apart and comparing DNA from two burials less than 400 kilometres away, from two different cultures (one hunter/gatherer the other farmers), researchers concluded that sometime around 5,000 years ago, people from Greece or Cyprus mixed with the local Scandinavian populations. Their gift: farming and genes.

The scientists don’t know who to blame for rutabagas.

Ove Persson and Evy Persson at the Ajvide excavations in Gotland, Sweden.

Darwin & Relationships

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 16:32:00 -0700

Darwin Noticed: “In Australia the imported hive-bee is rapidly exterminating the small, stingless native bee.”

Hats off to Darwin. Just when I think “Surely you could have cut to the chase Charles…” he sums up an idea with clarity and brevity. Maybe his affliction (he did have a loo installed in his study, something you don’t see in the postcards) provided the impetus for getting to the point.

Postcard of Darwin’s study at Down House

Struggle for Life most severe between Individuals and Varieties of the same Species is the final bit of Chapter III. A good science writer uses examples so lay readers can draw a picture in their minds — hive-bee versus the solitary native bee. Darwin cites other invasive species that do far better in a novel environment than the indigenous species: rats, cockroaches, and swallows. “…but probably in no one case could we precisely say why one species has been victorious over another in the great battle of life,” Darwin writes.

Battle, victory, struggle; why did Darwin choose these words? Did word choice set the stage for evolutionary theory being so focused on competition that what he wrote in the follow up paragraph took a longer time to absorb into the collective psyche? Each form of life has a relationship with every other form of a life in a given habitat, Darwins writes, and we can’t predict those relationships.

Take an insect like the Red Imported Fire Ant (RIFA) from Brazil and set it loose in Alabama: the climate might be similar, but it will have different relationships with the novel life forms it encounters in a new habitat. We can never anticipate what the relationships will be. The idea is a big part of environmental education today. But who was reading Darwin in the late 19th century, anyone? Definitely not the guy who released European starlings in New York City in 1890.

“It is good thus to try in imagination to give to any one species an advantage of another,” Darwin writes. “Probably in no single instance should we know what to do. This ought to convince us of our ignorance on the mutual relations of all organic beings; a conviction as necessary, as it is difficult to acquire.”

So the “struggle for existence” could just as easily be the less catchy — “lucky advantages”

But, for Darwin, war it is. Thankfully, though, it’s painless compared with human war. I guess. “When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.”

A Population Checked: Competition, Climate & Predation

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 12:47:00 -0700

The garden at Down House

Darwin had the handy Parslow as butler, a cook, gardeners — servants of all kinds to keep Down House running. Still, it’s impressive how he used his own time. When you read The Origin of Species, and think of how you spend your own days, watching Downton Abbey or The Hour seems a shocking waste of time. “There must be some worms or weeds I can study!”

Following Darwin’s Malthusian-inspired musings on populations, he turns to what keeps a species in check. At different stages of life, some species are particularly vulnerable — as eggs, for example. Plants seeds, too, suffer enormously, mostly because they’re choked by the vegetation already on the ground. They have no hope with the competing growth. And this is where you think what would have happened had Darwin grown up with video games?

Ever curious, Darwin digs (or probably a gardener digs) a patch three feet by two feet to get rid of any competing vegetation and watches what happens. Each of the 357 weeds that come up, he identifies and marks, and waits to see what happens. Will they all live? Slugs and insects are the chief nemesis of 295 of the weeds.

Darwin also keeps a three feet by four feet patch of turf unmowed or not browsed by animals. Out of 20 plant species, nine species never make it.

Lest his readers start musing on the vulnerabilities of the young in obtaining food, and how food determines populations, Darwin reminds us that plants and animals are some species’ meal ticket. He’s setting the stage for the concept of a food web. Before that, he has to explain another factor: climate, which sometimes has a direct bearing on population: the bitter winter of 1884-5 destroyed four-fifths of the birds on his grounds. But hang on, says Darwin. “Climate brings on the most severe struggle between individuals, whether of the same or distinct species, which subsist on the same kind of food.”

So let’s say its a bad year for salmon because when juveniles headed to the ocean to get big and strong before migrating back to their natal streams, the climate was not in their favour. They had less food. Fewer salmon come back, which is bad for bears. Bad for humans too, but which species will ultimately get more salmon: humans or bears?

YES Mag and KNOW Close: Thanks for the kind words

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 20:33:00 -0800

Nice posting about the closure of YES Mag, the science magazine for kids that I edited for 11 years.

This article about raccoons was the last one I wrote for YES Mag. Appropriately it has a Darwinian theme — evolution, city raccoons versus country raccoons.

For the past 8 months I was on sabbatical finishing my M.A. at the University of Victoria. The day I returned was pretty much the day Mad Science pulled the plug. I’ll miss everyone — writers, illustrators, Dave, Shannon, Sue, Melissa, Adrienne, Sam, Howie Woo, Jill, Matt, and the readers.

I’ll never forget the 12-year-old girl who asked me to sign the book Science Detectives. When I asked her what her favourite story was in the book, she replied, “The Case of the Twisted Code,” which was about the detective work that went into deciphering DNA. She liked the sidebar on Rosalind Franklin and wanted to be a geneticist when she grew up. Wow.

Thank you to everyone who made my job so fun. I’ll miss it.

Malthus, Charles Darwin, and Planet Elephant

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 17:07:00 -0800

African Elephant, Tanzania (Muhammad Mahdi Karim)

In Chapter III, The Struggle for Existence, Darwin talks elephants. He’s explaining the whole Malthusian concept of what happens when populations grow unchecked, even slow-growing mammals like elephants. In the late 19th century, elephants were considered the slowest breeders. (Nowadays, orangutans hold that distinction.)

Darwin calculates it this way: elephants (he doesn’t specify African or Asian) start to breed at around age 30. They breed to 90 years old. In that time, one elephant has 6 offspring, plus they live to 100 (they actually live to about 65 in the wild). Darwin calculated that after 740 to 750 years, the world would be a richer place with 19 million descendants of the original pair. Darwin didn’t exactly call the world a richer place with more elephants — and that’s the problem with not reading Darwin but trusting only Huxley’s interpretation of Darwin, or Dawkins, or whomever. It was an interesting point brought up by Frans de Waal at the American Association for the Advancement of Science plenary talk (February 20, 2012)

Read Darwin and you get the sense he is using his culture and language as an arsenal to get readers to understand the idea of natural selection. And in doing so, he opens up his writing to a reader’s interpretation, based on their own worldview. In Dawkin’s case, as de Waal says, as a combative atheist. But a church goer can read the following sentence and be assured natural selection is no threat to his religion because it is a wonder all on its own:

“We see these beautiful co-adaptations most plainly in the woodpecker and the mistletoe; and only a little less plainly in the humblest parasite which clings to hairs of a quadraped or feathers of a bird; in the structure of the beetle which dives through the water; in the plumed seed which is wafted by the gentlest breeze; in sort, we see beautiful adaptations everywhere and in every part of the organic world.” (p. 76, 6th edition.)

To Darwin, the urgent need is for people to understand how natural selection works…”unless it’s thoroughly ingrained in the mind, the whole economy of nature with every fact on distribution, rarity, abundance, extinction, and variation, will be dimly seen or quite misunderstood.” (p. 77, 6th edition.)

So why elephants as an example? They’re memorable, visual examples for a lay reader. As a science writer for kids, I often use elephants to explain size, weight, or something silly. Elephants are fun. Visit the Darwin home, Down House, and you get an idea of how much Charles and Emma enjoyed their kids. Maybe Charles explained scientific concepts to them in playful, easy ways, which then made its way into his writing.

You know what they say, Big Genus, Big Variety

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 14:12:00 -0800

It’s simple really: compare a large genus with a smaller genus and the larger will have way more variety. Darwin illustrated this by comparing plants from 12 countries and coleopterous insects of two districts (beetles and weevils.) In this section Darwin writes about the comparisons but shows no data. It dawns on me this book is for regular, educated folk back in 1859. Who wants the book cluttered with empirical evidence? An annotated version would be nice, I could pretend to pour over tables and charts.

Otter Person (Willows, 2011, J Isabella)

Twice Darwin questions that if life was an act of creation, why does a larger genus have more variety, where naturalists will find incipient species? And he remains preoccupied by the fact that it’s not always easy to define varieties and species, unless there is an intermediate linking form, or a “certain indefinite amount of difference.” It’s great how vague that is because you can’t pluck specimens from an environment clear across the world and expect to know what those differences are when that life form is out of context.

The impact of The Origin of Species on social thinking is no less than scientific discoveries of today. It’s easy to see how social Darwinists twist this idea of incipient species: to them if Europeans are the pinnacle of evolution then the “savages” of the new worlds were some kind of intermediate form of human. But what did the people long established in the Americas think of the explorers? The anecdote from Claude Levi-Strauss most famously illustrates the divide: while Europeans were deciding whether indigenous Americans were human, the indigenous population was busy drowning Spaniards and letting their corpses putrefy in the ocean — to see if they were corporeal beings. If the intruders were corporeal, they were persons with souls, but what kind of person? Humans were persons, but so was every other life form.

Doubtful Species and Gingerbread Men

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 13:17:00 -0800

Same species of Gingerbread Men? Different Varieties? (Photo: Jude Isabella)

While Darwin is a product of his times — in the first chapter he writes that only women and children value cats — he lays down sentences that can still launch a graduate student’s career.

“I have been struck by the fact, that if any animal or plant in a state of nature be highly useful to man, or from any cause closely attracts his attention, varieties of it will be almost universally recorded.” (Origin of the Species, 6th edition, p. 67.)

Again, as in the previous reading, Darwin goes into the arbitrariness of categorizing species, sub-species and varieties. And until naturalists agree on what a species is, any discussion of how to categorize a plant or animal is “vainly to beat the air.” In this age of creating synthetic DNA, it’s hard to imagine how difficult it was categorize the natural world during the 19th century since so many explorers were coming back to Europe with so many familiar plants and animals. And sometimes wildly different. But, back to Darwin’s observation, every culture has a taxonomy.

Taking this a step further is the study of folkbiology by researchers like Scott Atran and Douglas Medin. If every culture has this proclivity to categorize the living world, do they approach taxonomy in the same way? Yes. They rank living things, with anywhere from three to six ranks. If the Gingerbread Men in the photo were alive, they might be ranked in this way: Christmas Cookie/Gingerbread/ Cookie. And then depending on what’s important, categorize them in further detail according to Button Number/Smiling or Unsmiling/Melted Cuffs or Unmelted Cuffs. The idea of speciation is there — we all recognize living things as separate from non-living. Basic levels of categorization are knowledge dependent, which is exactly what Darwin is saying. To someone who has no conception of Christmas cookies, the assortment might be something like Men/Gingerbread/Cookie. But to an “expert” (let’s say across religious cultures) in Christmas cookies, they would get the first categorization. In other words, an “expert” in fish is likely to rank fish the same way as a someone who lives intimately with fish and is an expert strictly through experience and not formal education. Or to continue with the metaphor, a professional baker and a hobby baker would both classify the cookies in the same manner.

Another commonality across cultures is what Atran and Medin refer to as teleological essences — meaning people believe that a living thing evolves or behaves or has certain characteristics to ensure its survival. (Maybe the Gingerbread Men with the Melted Cuffs look unappetizing so they don’t get eaten. I dressed the first batch before putting them into the oven. Oops.) The thing is, genetics have allowed scientists to tease out the differences between genotype and phenotype, but this has not altered the psychological perception of what is the “essence” of a living thing. I can’t improve on Atran’s and Medin’s example of the heart as the essence of a human in Western thought. While we know it’s the brain that’s responsible for who we are, why do heart transplant recipients feel they’re acquiring more than just a heart? (I don’t personally believe in cellular memory, but what if a person who receives a new heart does? Couldn’t it change his behaviour?)

A couple of other characteristics humanity shares is an inability to turn off their smarts (we’re constantly trying to organize our worlds); and we’ll rapidly transmit culturally how to survive in the natural world (more evident in cultures less industrialized.)

Research into folkbiology makes a compelling argument for a “perceptual system to be tuned to this same level of biological reality, and we suspect that this is the default condition for human beings who depend directly on nature for survival (i.e., without the intermediary of supermarkets and shops).” Emphasis mine.

Chapter Two: Individual Differences: Darwin underscores variation within a species

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:10:00 -0800

Weaver Creek sockeye salmon, October 2011/From one…

In Chapter II, Variations under Nature, Darwin starts by acknowledging that it’s tough to pin down what a species is and what variety means. He defines the problem naturalists have always had: at what point is a deviation from the norm just a deviation from the norm, or a new variety? Categorization is based on observable traits — phenotype, a word only coined about 50 years after The Origin of the Species. Observable traits, Darwin notes, can vary widely within a species. He points out an observational bias of the ”systematists” (taxonomists) who are too devoted to the idea of the intransigence of an organism’s important characteristics, sometimes even ranking the importance of individual organs. The same taxonomists ascribe variation only among non-important traits. Non-important being something that has nothing to do with an organism’s ability to reproduce successfully.

Darwin got me thinking about observer bias.

…Many, Dry Rack Fishery, Fraser River, July 2010

To a certain extent “observable” depends on what an observer believes is important. Some characteristics are obviously important — a bat without echolocation abilities is a dead bat.

But importance is often tied up with context. Take the the two-barred flasher butterfly from Central America, for example. The Tzeltal people in southern Mexico have a number of names for the butterfly. To outsiders, there appears to be no differences to warrant multiple species names, unless you look at the butterfly’s larvae — the caterpillars. Different types of larvae eat different crops, which is important to the Tzeltal people, and they reflected that importance in their own taxonomy of the butterflies. The different names for what appears to be the same butterfly puzzled Western scientists for years because they never considered the butterflies’ relationship with crops.

You could say the same about settlers to the West Coast of Canada and their encounter with Pacific salmon. Hudson’s Bay Company men wrote about salmon all the time in the Journals of Fort Langely (men in charge of HBC trade posts kept diaries, in this case for Fort Langley, 1827 to 1830.) Yet they rarely mentioned any of the five species of Pacific salmon. European settlers would have been used to Atlantic salmon. But to the inhabitants of the West Coast, the five salmon species, the different populations within a species, and the healthy numbers of individuals within a population were (and are) extraordinarily important.

In all fairness, any settler living long enough on the coast or along the Fraser River probably quickly realized Pacific salmon were a very different breed of salmon from Atlantic. Just as likely, however, they failed to understand the implication of variety, especially among the species most sought for canning — sockeye. A sockeye is not just a sockeye, no matter how alike they look. Some sockeye are powerhouses with a physiological toolkit that propels them over a thousand kilometres upstream, in fluctuating temperatures, to spawn in their native river. Other sockeye could never make that journey — they’re adapted to short journeys within a tight temperature zone (like the Weaver Creek sockeye in the photo.) And within each population will be individual differences.

In Individual Differences, the first subhead of Chapter II, Darwin writes: “These individual differences are of the highest importance for us, for they are often inherited, as must be familiar to everyone; and they thus afford the materials for natural selection to act on and accumulate, in the same manner as man accumulates in any given direction individual differences in his domesticated productions.”

Darwin goes on to shoot down this rigid adherence to the intransigence of important traits by bringing up dimorphism and trimorphism. Species, an arbitrary concept in some ways, are not fixed and variation is the norm, and without it, well, life would not evolve.

Darwin, Strawberries, and Downton (Abbey?)

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 12:27:00 -0800

Down House Kitchen Garden, July 2011

Charles Darwin ends Chapter One with “Circumstances Favourable to Man’s Power Over Selection.” For all of Darwin’s clarity, his writing is formal, and a disembodied English voice from a British period drama seems to be narrating this blog. (Right now the voice sounds like Hugh Bonneville. A pity considering Maggie Smith has all the best lines.)

Darwin focuses on variability in this subsection on domestication. The most important circumstance for successful selection, Darwin writes, is the sheer number of individuals in a population.

Plant and animal breeders have valued variability for a long time. In part, it made them wealthy. As Darwin remarks, the poor people in Yorkshire can never improve their sheep as they only own small lots. Another circumstance favourable, in regard to animal selection, is the ability to enclose them. And, of course, you need money and land to enclose grazing animals. It’s easier to play God with pigeons, since they generally mate for life.

At Down House, Darwin kept pigeons and a large garden for his selection experiments. Darwin manipulated garden plants — notably potatoes — but probably strawberry plants too. He wrote about strawberries in The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. He uses the fruit (not truly a berry) in The Origin of Species to show how quickly humans will domesticate a crop if they value it. Only three kinds of strawberry varieties were known, in France, in 1746. Twenty years later, there were five varieties, and by the time Darwin writes, strawberry varieties were “inumerable.” Part of the reason, Darwin writes, lies with the promiscuity of American strawberries as noted by horticulturist T.A. Knight writing in 1818. “…there is abundant and additional evidence of the extent to which the American forms spontaneously cross. We owe indeed to such crosses most of our choicest existing varieties.” (pp. 351/352 The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication.)

The question begging to be asked: were the “wild” strawberries of North America “unconsciously selected” by people living there for thousands of years?

Knight successfully crossed dozens of strawberry varieties. One selection was named “Downton” and he published a colour plate of the delectable fruit, described as “exquisitely rich far excelling any other ever tasted.” Which is also a good description of Downton Abbey (not so much the series itself, but the setting. No idea if the creator and writer of the series Julian Fellowes knows that, and from the Wikipedia page, there is no indication that he has horticultural leanings.)

Darwin ends acknowledging that variability is governed by many unknown laws. By this time, scientists know variability is crucial to selection and that they’re slightly clueless as to what ensures variability, aside from great numbers of individuals within a population. It’s all the more tragic that today, knowing what we know, we fail to protect variability in wild food through habitat protection — salmon on the West Coast, being a prime example.

Principles of Selection, Anciently Followed/Unconscious Selection

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 13:33:00 -0800

Now that I have a Kindle Touch, reading The Origin of Species is easier. Lugging around the hardcover is challenging, which means I’ve spent more time reading Harry Potter in Spanish than Darwin’s ideas about the domestication of species. (The first HP book, Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal, when editors were unafraid of editing JK Rowling.)

Where was I? Right. Chapter I — Principles of Selection. I learned quite a bit. One being that the thistle that threatened to overtake my garden a few years ago (blown over from a neighbour who planted it consciously) is not a thistle. It’s a teasel. Fuller’s teasel is cultivated in British gardens and occasionally escapes to places where they’re unwanted. There’s also a wild teasel (and other varieties). Darwin writes that the Fuller’s teasel with its hooks — “unrivalled by any mechanical contrivance” — is probably a variety descended from the wild teasel. The hooks, he surmises, could have arisen suddenly from a seedling. When humans notice a trait in plants or animals particular useful, Darwin says, humans cultivate the trait. Teasel, for example, was used for carding wool and for brushing wool material. (Today, some people tout it as an effective treatment for Lyme disease, though no studies give it a thumbs up.)

To Darwin, however, humans also breed organisms unconsciously and his example is the “savages and barbarians,” particularly the ones he met in Tierra del Fuego during his Beagle years. The indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego throw their scraps of food to the dogs that possess characteristics useful to the humans, unconsciously allowing the desired dogs to breed more. (And he writes in The Voyage of the Beagle, that the dogs were more valued than old women when the community was visited by famine. The dogs helped them hunt otters and other animals.) And this is where you start to understand how modern science stepped off the path of unbiased observation. Reading Darwin, it’s easy to conclude that selection, conscious or unconscious but always natural (since humans are part of the natural world), is always an improvement. It plays into the Victorian era’s preoccupation with progress, socially and scientifically: the more you methodically change something the better it is.

“If it has taken centuries or thousands of years to improve or modify most of our plants up to their present standard of usefulness to man, we can understand how it is that neither Australia or the Cape of Good Hope, nor any other region inhabited by quite uncivilised man, has afforded us a single plant worth culture.”

And here I’m waiting for Darwin to say that “uncivilised man” selected plants for his own use, in his own habitat, etc. Instead, this follows:

“It is not that these countries, so rich in species, do not by a strange chance possess the aboriginal stocks of any useful plants, but that the native plants have not been improved by continued selection up to a standard of perfection comparable with that acquired by plants in countries anciently civilised.”

Wow. No wonder when settlers arrive in places like Canada’s West Coast, they’re dismissive of the way the indigenous population tends their plants and animals. Or rather, dismissive that the people tended anything at all. Over 150 years later, and we’re finally understanding just how managed the land- and seascapes were on the coast and managed with biodiversity in mind. We’re learning that methodically manipulating our biological surroundings is not all good, all the time. And some societies might do it better than others, depending on the overall goal.

But what other choice did Darwin have than to use an analogy — domesticating wild species — to speak to his audience? The scientist can never be separated from his time period. Writing on natural selection today, what would Darwin change? Hopefully not the clarity of his writing. It’s astonishing how unreadable academic publications can be these days.

Another tidbit I learned from these two passages was that Eurocentric societies love books about dogs. In 1845 William Youatt wrote what would be his most famous book, The Dog, which was part of a series called The Library of Useful Things (essentially modern day textbooks.) A mostly self-taught veterinarian, Youatt wrote handbooks on farm animals for the Library. He had such a good reputation that he was hired to treat the late Lord Byron’s favourite pooch, Lyon, a great big black and white Newfoundland. It seems Lyon died shortly after Youatt got his hands on the him. Whoops.

Photo: The Sand Walk at Down House, Darwin’s home. (Jude Isabella)

Introduction and Variation Under Domestication

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 10:59:00 -0700

“I hope that I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision.” So says Charles Darwin at the end of the first paragraph in the Introduction. Let’s see, it occurs to him in 1837 that something might be made out of the mystery of mysteries — the origin of species — and he sets out to accumulate evidence. In 1858, he presents a paper (On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties) with naturalist Alfred Wallace because the latter is about to inform the world about natural selection even though Darwin’s been working on it for over 20 years. In light of Darwin’s caution, the speed at which people accumulate research and publish seems wrecklessly fast. And really, considering the science news cycle — new study says blah blah blah, which means another scientist sets out to prove those findings false, publishes, and the whole cycle starts anew. It’s a strange and exhausting dance between media and scientific research.

In his introduction, Darwin lays out what he’ll cover in each chapter, and he’s prescient enough — or maybe he already had a private discussion with someone — to acknowledge that explaining transitions will be tough. “..how a simple being or a simple organ can be changed and perfected into a highly developed being or into an elaborately constructed organ…” Read “eye” in that line, the argument given by many creationists, an argument that made it into the movie “Paul”, about an alien that escaped Area 51, is picked up by two British scifi geeks, and their road trip, made complete by an evangelical that tosses aside God after her bum eye is fixed.

Chapter One, Variation Under Domestication starts with “Causes of Variability” where Darwin muses on an individual’s nature versus environmental conditions as a key to variability in a species. “…as I have incidentally shown in my work on ‘Variation under Domestication,’ there are two factors: namely the nature of the organism, and the nature of the conditions. The former seems to be much the more important….” The nature versus nurture argument, right off the bat, with Darwin giving nature an advantage. It’s easy to see where Social Darwinists got their ammunition. Darwin uses species like wheat to illustrate his point, but you can see where political theorists would seize on this idea of genetic determinism. And wild to think that “The Origin of Species” was published in 1859 and Gregor Mendel conducted his pea plant experiments from 1856 to 1863.

Historical Sketch, The Origin of Species (The One Darwin Wrote)

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 14:03:00 -0700

Today is the day I started reading The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, sixth edition. It seems fitting to read it over the next year as I work on my book about Pacific salmon. This morning I read “Historical Sketches” where Darwin explores the lineage, so to speak, of evolutionary thought. He cites 34 authors — English, French, German, and American — who believed in the modification of species, or at least did not believe each species sprang to life in separate acts of creation. He even begins with Aristotle, who had foreshadowed natural selection in his writings though Darwin notes “but how little Aristotle fully comprehended the principle…”

If anyone studies biology, the history of science, or anthropology, the usual names come up: Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus, Buffon, and Saint-Hilaire writing in the late 18th century. But it was Dr. W.C. Wells in 1813 and Mr. Patrick Matthew in 1831 that Darwin actually gives some credit to for coming close to articulating the principles of natural selection. Darwin wrote of Matthew: “He clearly saw, however, the full force of the principle of natural selection.” It seems Matthew’s writing, like so many others, was too tough to follow at times.

Some of the writers insisted they came up with the idea of natural selection before Darwin and Wallace. Maybe the worst offender — to Darwin, at least, because he mentions him in the book — was Richard Owen who wrote to The London Review editor to claim that he came up with the theory of natural selection before Darwin. “It is consolatory to me that others find Professor Owen’s controversial writing as difficult to understand to reconcile with each other as I do.” And besides, Darwin writes, Owen, himself and Alfred Wallace were all preceded by Wells and Matthew.

My favourite, however, is the Irish doctor Henry Freke who published the “Origin of Species by Mean of Organic Affinity” in 1861, following his insistence that he was ahead of the game in 1851 when he wrote about animals and plants descending from a “single filament,” which was pretty much what Erasmus had said much earlier. The London Review wrote that Freke’s 1851 article was notable for its “verbose, elliptical, repetitive diction.”

Darwin finished the Historical Sketch with the reading of his and Wallace’s paper before the Linnean Society in 1858, giving Wallace full marks for clarity — what writing is all about.

As for that image of the seal: will the Oak Bay Marina seals eventually becomes a subspecies? A subspecies twice the size of other harbour seals?

The Anthropologist: Why Guidos Are Good, Really

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 13:45:00 -0800

Okay, I’ve just noticed that Rolling Stone has a member of Jersey Shore on its cover and I have something — okay, a LOT — to say about that show and many others featuring Italian Americans as stereotypes. The following is a much shortened version — snappier too, I hope — of an anthropology paper I wrote on the Italian American stereotype. (Below I’ve listed references used for the paper.)

Being of Italian descent, Italian American stereotypes — most recently MTV’s Jersey Shore’s guidos — always made me shudder. Surely the homeland that inspired Americans and Canadians to sip espressos and nibble biscotti had nothing to do with creating The Situation as well?

Then one day, like the apple hitting Newton’s head, the cannoli hit me in the face — we need the violent, the seductive, and yes, the pathetic guido stereotypes, to give ourselves an identity. Italian Americans are a completely assimilated ethnic group that creates and consumes false cultural stereotypes for two reasons. The first is because we’re not crazy about being like every other white, middle class American. No stereotype means we’re boring. The gangsters, the Italian stallions, the fessos (clowns) are perfect foils against blandness. MTV’s Jersey Shore gives us our fessos. Thank you MTV.

The second reason has to do with our history, which is intertwined with southern Italy, a place where the people have had a strong sense of self-reliance and a general mistrust of authority.

Most Italians first arrived in the U.S. after the First World War when over four million of them entered as legal immigrants — the largest number of immigrants from one ethnic group in the shortest amount of time. Eighty percent of those post-unification immigrants were southern Italians. They left because the unification of Italy, completed by 1871, turned southern Italy into an American south, with a plantation economy providing cheap labor and raw materials for the north, which had industrialization goals. The future was bleak for Neapolitans, Calabrians, Abruzzeze, and Sicilians. And they were also still reeling from the violence of unification, which was particularly hard on the southern rebels and their families. In fact, acts against the southern Italians were frequent in history and the stories of peasants melting into the hilly terrain to escape persecution from invaders are well known.

Unification was just another affirmation for southern Italians that the only reliable people were family. (The next affirmation would be the fight against the fascists during the Second World War.) It reinforced a distrust of authority and clannish behavior the southern Italians were to bring with them upon immigration.

This attitude permeates Italian Americans stereotypes and it’s at complete odds with reality. Italian Americans are mostly of mixed descent and many occupy positions of great authoriy: two Supreme Court justices and the former speaker of the House of Representatives are Italian Americans. The first woman to run on a Presidential ticket was an Italian American (Geraldine Ferraro). Should we mention the Cuomo family? Rudy Guiliani? And on a personal note, my brother is a judge. Let’s neglect the fact, for a moment, that one of my uncles was a union leader and my aunt used to answer the phone: “Do you want money or a job?”

See? I don’t know if that’s actually true, but I can’t help myself: I buy into this dualism — a mythical Italian American versus reality. Why? That goes back to the first reason, we need the stereotype to avoid being like every other “white” American because we are not a visible minority, most of us speak no Italian, and again, most of us are of mixed-descent. About 80 percent of children with Italian ancestry in the U.S. born during the 1980s where reported to have some other ancestry as well. (Of course the Italian Americans in Jersey Shore aren’t really Italian American.)

Luckily for us, our ancestors had impeccable timing, otherwise we might not have a stereotype. The development of cinema coincided with the mass exodus of Italians from the southern part of the country whose only unifying identity was one of self-reliance and anti-authority.

When they got to America they often met, for the first time, paesani from other parts of Italy. Homogeneity took shape only over time, mostly in the second and third generations. But the myth was important, and for a myth to work it needs repetition, hence the endless films and television shows.

While myth helps define our culture, cultural meaning often springs from identifying what you are not. That’s why Italian Americans complain about the stereotype, which is almost always created by other Italian Americans. It’s like a loud dinner conversation in public that non-Italian Americans believe is an argument. See, see, we’re Italian, we’re fighting about it! When Italian Americans criticize the stereotypes in the media, it reminds the public at large that such a thing as “Italian American” exist.

We started complaining early. In 1932, Scarface (which was about the life of Al Capone) showed 43 murders. It was denounced by the Order of the Sons of Italy, founded in 1905. The group even has an anti-defamation arm called The Commission for Social Justice that polices unflattering images of Italian American and promotes Italian heritage in a more positive light. From “The Untouchables” television series in the 1960s to the “The Sopranos”, the group has protested stereotyping on television. They endorsed “Canvas”, a film about a “real” Italian American family in 2007. Ever heard of it?

The National Italian American Foundation, founded in 1975, also keeps tabs on the Italian American image, constantly. Their latest protest is against “Jersey Shore.”

And if those two groups were not loud enough, The Italic Institute of America (Guardian of Italian Heritage), founded in 1987, commissioned a study of Italian Americans in film from 1928 to 2002 and found that in 1,233 movies, Italians were perceived positively in 374, and negatively in 859. But who creates more cultural awareness, “Canvas” or “The Godfather?” It makes no difference if the latter is a myth because it has no negative impact on us socio-economically or politically.

Italian Americans actually have the best of both worlds: a riveting stereotype and social mobility.

In one generation the Italian laborers of 100 years ago made great strides documented in a 1938 study, “The Italians of New York: A Survey.” Statistics show that soon after arriving Italian Americans moved into more skilled occupations and the image is one of an upwardly mobile immigrant class. The study concludes, “whatever may separate the Italian American from the rest of his fellow citizens disappears in the third generation.”

It’s no accident that it was these second and third generations of Italian Americans who, losing their heritage, took up what non-Italians in Hollywood began, and started to create, produce, and sell Italian American stereotypes. Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather (published in 1969) admits he wrote with the intention of creating a myth. In the 1970s, it was Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppola who successfully exploited the stereotype. The list of participating Italian American actors is practically endless.

By the 1970s the Italian Americans had moved to the suburbs and when that generation of kids grew up, the mythical Italians moved too. The Soprano family could have lived in my neighborhood (the creator, David Chase, grew up in Clifton, which borders my hometown) and the Jersey Shore is where we went — and still go — to play. So, Jersey Shore is bad for Italian Americans?

No, it’s just publicity, and you know what they say about publicity — it’s all good.

References:

1) Alba, Richard D., and Victor Nee 2003. “Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.

2) Bondanella, Peter E. 2004. “Hollywood Italians: Dagos, Palookas, Romeos, Wise Guys, and Sopranos.” New York, New York, Continuum Publishing

3) Bromberger, Christian 2006. “Towards Anthropology of the Mediterranean, History and Anthropology.” Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 17, No. 2, June 2006, pp. 91–107.

4) Briggs, John 1978. “An Italian Passage: Immigrants to Three American Cities, 1890 -1930.” New Haven and London, Yale University Press.

5) Casillo, Robert 2007 “Gangster Priest: The Italian American Cinema of Martin Scorsese.” University of Toronto Press.

6) Cavallero, Jonathan J. 2004. “Gangsters, Fessos, Tricksters, and Sopranos: The Historical Roots of Italian American Stereotype Anxiety.” Journal of Popular Film & Television, 32 (2): 50-63.

7) Cortes, Carlos E. 1987. “Italian Americans in Film: From Immigrants to Icons.” MELUS, Vol. 14, No. 3/4. Italian American Literature, pp. 107-126.

8) Gambino, Richard 1974. “Blood of My Blood; the Dilemma of the Italian Americans.” Garden City, New York, Doubleday.

9) Italic Institute of America, accessed April 18, 2010:

10) Klein, Herbert S. 1983. “The Integration of Italian Immigrants into the United States and Argentina: A Comparative Analysis.” American Historical Review 88, no. 2: 306. Military & Government Collection.

11) Leider, Emily W. 2002. “Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino.” New York, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

12) Levi-Strauss, Claude 1955. “The Structural Study of Myth” The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 68, No. 270, Myth: A Symposium (Oct. - Dec., 1955), pp. 428-444, University of Illinois Press on behalf of American Folklore Society.

13) Mintz 2007. Italian Immigration. Digital History. Accessed April 18, 2010:

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/italian_immigration.cfm

14) National Italian American Foundation, accessed multiple times March 31 to April 19, 2010:

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15) Order Sons of Italians in America, accessed multiple times March 31 to April 19, 2010:

http://www.osia.org/

16) Roediger, David R. 1994. “Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, politics, and working class history.” London and New York, Verso.

17) Tamburri, Anthony Julian, Paolo Giordano, Fred L. Gardaphé, 1998. “From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana.” Indiana, Purdue University Press.

18) United States Census Bureau, “Ancestry 2000: Census 2000 Brief”, Issued June 2004, accessed April 18, 2010:

19) United States Census Bureau, “DP-2. Profile of Selected Social Characteristics: 2000”

Data Set: Census 2000 Summary File 3 (SF 3) - Sample Data

Geographic Area: Nutley township, Essex County, New Jersey, accessed April 18, 2010:>

20) Weibel-Orlando, Joan 2008. “A Room of (His) Own: Italian and Italian American Male-bonding Spaces and Homosociality.” Journal of Men’s Studies 16, no. 2: 159-176.

21) Wildsmith, Elizabeth, Myron P. Gutmann, Brian Gratton 2003. “Assimilation and intermarriage for U.S. immigrant groups, 1880–1990.” The History of the Family, Vol. 8 (4): 563-584.

22) Workers of the Federal Writers’ Project, Works in Progress Administration in the City of New York 1938. “The Italians of New York.” New York, New York, Random House.

23) The World Book Encyclopedia 2007. Updated regularly, accessed March 31 to April 19, 2010:>

24) Yans-McLaughlin, Virginia 1977. “Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880-1930.” London and Ithica, New York, Cornell University Press.

25) Trailer, Jersey Shore Trailer, accessed April 18, 2010: