I wasn't very happy with the caterpillar photos last week, so I had another go. Still not quite there, but I think I might end up with a nice shot of these guys before they turn into moths:

Labels: caterpillar, lepidoptera, photos, sci-blogs, sunday spinelessness

 
I can't tell if this is the endemic species Nyctemera annulata, or its cousin from across the Tasmin sea, N. amica. The latter has established itself in New Zealand, and, since the two species are very closely related and can seemingly interbreed quite happily, it seems we may be witnessing the re-amalgamation of previously  seperate evolutionary lineages. The philosophical implications of such a process, and what it means for the definition of species or the goals of conservation biology (did you know DoC shoots pied stilts that pair-off with the endemic black stilt?) will have to wait until I have enough time to say something sensible about them. For now, the caterpillars are pretty cool:

Labels: environment and ecology, lepidoptera, photos, sci-blogs, sunday spinelessness

The ground weta we uncovered in the garden this afternoon, which got sick of its photoshoot and decided to round on the photographer

Labels: orthoptera, photos, sci-blogs, sunday spinelessness, weta

I've never taken a good photo of an ant. I've tried plenty of times, but even when I've happened across queens, whose size should give the point'n'shooter the best chance to capture a passable shot, I've failed. I haven't given up though, and that's why I was spent about 15 minutes of this morning on my hands and knees pointing my camera at the little red, and slightly larger black, ants that patrol the paving stones in front of our house. I failed again, but if you spend 15 minutes contemplating the little creatures that run our world you are pretty much guaranteed to run into something interesting. Today I saw something I've never seen before

Labels: arachnophilia, harvestman, Opiliones, sci-blogs, sunday spinelessness

Bruce A. Beutler, Jules A. Hoffmann, Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt, Adam Riess, Ralph M. Steinman and Dan Shechtman. Seven new Nobel Laureates and seven new names to include in the most exclusive club in science.

The Nobel prize comes with a trip to Stockholm, a gold medal and a share of million dollar prize. But perhaps even more than that, it provides a cachet that extends beyond the world of science and into the every day. Nobel lauretes are recognized as the best of the best: people whose intellectual achievements have changed the way we think of the world. The gravitas we attach to people who can put 'Nobel Prize winning scientist' in front of their name means their opinions are afforded special status. Indeed, listening to people who ought to know what they're talking about is a pretty good way to learn about the world. But a Nobel Prize doesn't represent a barrier to sloppy thinking. In fact, if anything there seems to be tendency for acknowledgement of expertise in one area to provide an unfounded confidence to speak out on other subjects. Some laureates have fallen for the most appalling anit-scientific rubbish. So much so, the term "Nobel Prize Syndrome" or "Nobel Disease" has been coined to describe this phenomenom. So, without wishing to take any of the gloss of this year's Nobelists, here is a list of some of those that were brought low by the Nobel Disease.

Linus Pauling (Chemistry and Peace, Vitamin C fanatic)

Surely the saddest case. Pauling was a supreme scientist, one of the first chemists to get serious about using the tools of physical chemistry to understand the basis of biology. His most famous contribution was pioneering methods that use what we know about the nature of chemical bonds to find the structure of biological chemicals. Evolutionary biologists like me remember him as the guy the first proposed that we could use the rate of change in chemical structures to measure evolutionary time between species. He's also the only person to have won a real science Nobel and the Nobel Peace Prize - the latter coming for his activism for nuclear nonproliferation.

Then there was the vitamin C business. Pauling became convinced that high doses of vitamin C would cure.. well, amost everything. The initial results of Pauling's research were promising, but it soon became clear they wouldn't hold up to more rigourous tests. It seems Pauling's belief was stronger than any evidence, and he doubled down, advoacting high does of vitamin C in popular and scientific works. Today it's almost impossible to talk to an advocate of these cures without having Pauling's name thrown add you.

Kary Mullis (Chemistry, HIV denialist)

If Pauling is the saddest case of the Nobel Disease, Kary Mulllis might just be the oddest. Mullis is credited with inventing the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) - a method used  hundreds of thousands of times every day in molecular biology labs around the world to amplify small, specific regions of DNA. I can't even imagine how you'd do genetics without PCR, so his achievement is certainly worth the prize. But he is seriously strange. When people talk about Mullis' personality, they emphasise his use of LSD and his love of surfing and motorbikes. I guess that's quirky, but science takes all sorts and none of those would make him unique among Nobel Laureates. However, I'm not sure there has ever been an acceptance speech quite like his. Before Mullis embarked on his career in biochemistry he had a go at being a novelist, and his speech reflected this:

And now as December threatened Christmas, Jennifer, that crazy, wonderful woman chemist, had dramatically left our house, the lab, headed to New York and her mother, for reasons that seemed to have everything to do with me but which I couldn't fathom. I was beginning to learn tragedy. It differs a great deal from pathos, which you can learn from books. Tragedy is personal. It would add strength to my character and depth someday to my writing. Just right then, I would have preferred a warm friend to cook with. Hold the tragedy lessons. December is a rotten month to be studying your love life from a distance.

So, I don't think much of his writing, but he won a Nobel Prize and I'm some guy writing a blog - so it's hard for me to pick on him for that. Sadly, he's done much worse. In his autobiography he claimed the theories of Ozone depletion and climate change were the result of a conspiracy between scientists and government organisations seeking to continue their funding. Even worse, he is an HIV denialist. Mullis has never done any scientific research on HIV or AIDs, but PCR is, on rare occasions, used to diagnose HIV. You can imagine the mileage that those strange people that deny the link between HIV and AIDS get from being able to say "the inventor of the PCR test doesn't even believe it!"Mullis has gone to say anti-retrovirals don't work and agree that  AIDS isn't a disease that people who lead "normal, American lifestyles" run much of a risk of developing.

Also there is something is his book about being visited by a fluorescent alien raccoon.

William Shockley (Physics, Eugenicist)

Labels: Nobel Prize, sci-blogs, science, skepticism

It's Nobel season. Over the next month or so, we'll hear who has received a telegram summoning them to Stockholm and to fame and fortune (the cash part of the prize is worth about 1.5 million dollars). Of course, the Nobels are a big deal. Prizes are given to recognise people who have fundamentally changed the way we think about the world or the way science works. So it's nice that in the week before we start thinking about those huge sicentific acheievements we have the Ig Nobel prizes to remind us that most science is small, and sometimes it's even prettty funny. The Ig Nobels were set up to honour science that "first makes people laugh, then makes them think". This year's winner were announced on Friday and prizes went to researchers who trained a tortoise to yawn on command so they they could find out if yawning was contagious among these animals (it's not), a Japanese team who developed an alarm clock that wakes you up by spraying a fine mist of wasabi across the room and a team who finally provided an answer to that age-old question - "why do discus throwers get dizzy while hammer throwers don't?" (here's that answer). But perhaps the award that's done the most to make people laugh is the one presented  to Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz in recognition of their studies into male Australian beetles that would rather mate with beer bottles than their female counterparts.

Image © Darryl Gwynne

Gwyne and Rentz found that they could attract males just by putting beer bottles out, in 30 minutes of observation that managed to lure two of them. Sadly for J. saundersi, this battle with the bottle can have devastating effects. Gwynne observed a beetle being attacked by ants "which were biting at  the soft portions of his everted genitalia" and another dead one being eaten by ants.
I have to admit, the idea of a beetle so madly fixated on a beer bottle that it will give its life in the hope of mating with it is so ridiculous as to be funny. So I'm laughing, but is there anything in this research that fulfills the Ig Nobel's other criterion and makes us think? Well, I'm not sure you and I are so different from a beetle with a pathological sexual attraction to discarded beer bottles.

J. saundersi males had a perfectly sensible approach to finding partners that only broke down when a sudden change in the environment made last generation's strategy look stupid. Any species can fall into that trap because natural selection, the process that makes organisms fit their environment, has no foresight. All that selection can do is adapt the next generation to the last habitat. Usually that's fine, but lately habitats have been changing quickly. The rapid technological change of the last few thousand years has left humans in a few evolutionary traps of our own. The most commonly cited example is about food. Until recently, foods rich in fat and sugar were pretty hard to come by. Since these foods are important for regular running of our body, we have evolved brains that reward us when we eat them. Today, our brains no longer match our environment.  In most western societies fatty and sugary meals are about 10 minutes drive away and, perhaps not surprisingly, the developed world is dealing with a epidemics of obesity and type 2 diabetes. 

I think there is an even more important example of this phenomenon for people that aim to live a skeptical life - our brains developed in a world quite different than the one we live in. The share volume of cognitive biases that psychologists have identified reveal how our intuitions can stray from reality. Not all of those biases arise from a mismatch between our brain and our environment. Brains aren't truth finding machines, because knowing something is true doesn't, in and of itself, provide any survival advantage. But some of these mistaken intuitions really do seem to arise from our evolutionary history. Most of the people that have ever lived have done so in bands of about 50 people. Every piece of news they ever learned about the world came through those people, and maybe a few interactions with other groups. Today, I can open a new browser tab and read one of 50 million twitter streams; or watch, read and hear news from almost anywhere on the planet. But I have still have my brain, which mainly evolved to deal with news from about 50 people, so part of me is amazed when I hear someone won the lottery three times, or someone else has given birth to three children in three different years but each at 7:43. Of course, in a world of 6.7 billion people these things have to happen, but, as much as I know that, it's hard to convince my brain these aren't amazing events. 

I said this fact problem matters for skeptical types, and, indeed, our faulty intuitions can have effects at least as bad as those faced by the amorous beetles that precipitated this post. If you live in a world with 50 contacts, and one of them tells you they got sick after eating a specific sort of food, that's pretty good evidence that you should avoid that food. If you live in a world with billions of potential contacts, and one of them tells you that someone, somewhere got sick after receiving a vaccination or got better after taking a homeopathic remedy that's not evidence for anything. Just like the triple lotto winners, in a world where millions of doses of vaccine given out, someone will get sick after a vaccine whether it causes an illness or not.  Thankfully, we've developed methods that help us, as much as possible, to remove our intuitions from the way we handle evidence. Together, we call those methods science and it's crucial that those methods are the heart of the way our societies develop if we are going to avoid our own evolutionary traps

So, by all means laugh at J. saundersiand his futile, fatal attempts to impregnate a glass bottle, but do try an be aware that similar traps are lurking in our own brains.

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Labels: beetle, sci-blogs, science, skepticism, sunday spinelessness