Rosemary and Peter Grant during a reception in their honor at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences

Peter and Rosemary Grant, husband-and-wife evolutionary biologists at Princeton University, have written about a medium ground finch that is heavier, has a broader beak and sings a different song than its closest relative.

The Grants have documented the emergence of this medium ground finch lineage since 1981, when they caught what they believe was an immigrant bird on Daphne Major, a tiny Galapagos island where they’ve measured, weighed and tagged ground finches several months every year since 1973.

The new lineage, which nobody has dared to call a new species yet, has been molded by droughts, above average rainfall and competition for food – factors that also affected other finches living on Daphne Major.

“In the 2000s, the birds are not the same as the ones that were on the island when we started,” Peter Grand told a crowd of more than 200 who had come to his and his wife’s presentation April 11 at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh.

That evolution can happen as researchers watch was unexpected. That the Grants documented the making of what might be a new species in 20 years has turned them into legends.Their research has won multiple awards and is featured prominently in biology textbooks and one Pulitzer-Prize-winning book.

The couple’s visit to North Carolina’s Research Triangle was the result of a collaboration of the museum, N.C. State University and the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center.

Thirteen species of ground finches live on the Galapagos archipelago, a cluster of more than a dozen islands located in the Pacific Ocean about 600 miles west of Equador. They are plain birds with brown, gray or black plumage that have been famous since they helped Darwin develop the theory of evolution.

Darwin's finches

All descend from one species that lived on the South American mainland.

The smallest finch species on the Galapagos Islands weighs about one-fourth of the largest species and each species has developed a specific beak to eat a special diet.

The Warbler finch has a slender beak to probe for insects. Ground finches have broad beaks to crush seeds of various sizes. Cactus finches have long, curved beaks to probe flowers for nectar. The large tree finch has a powerful, curved beak to strip bark and extract insects and termites.

The diet has a lot to do with where a species lives. The medium tree finch, for example, can only be found on Floreana Island. The common cactus finch lives on all but the five Galapagos Islands that are inhabited by the large cactus finch.

Daphne Major is home to four species, the Grants reported. The couple caught small, medium and large ground finches and cactus finches, including some that had immigrated from neighboring islands.

The males of each species sing a different song, which male and female birds learn as nestlings listening to their fathers. Males and females of a species recognize each other by that song. Interbreeding can occur, Rosemary Grant said, for example, when the fatherly lesson gets garbled because the nest is close to the nest of another species in the same cactus bush.

Immigrant hybrid male the Grants caught in 1981. Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

In 1981, the Grants caught a medium ground finch immigrant whose plumage was particularly glossy and black. The male bird was about 20 percent bigger than the biggest medium ground finch captured on Daphne Major and had a wider beak. It also sang an unusual song and a blood test determined that it carried cactus finch genes.

The immigrant hybrid male mated with a female hybrid that also carried genes of both species. Three generations of offspring – finches live up to 16 years – bred with local medium ground finches and other hybrids.

Then, all but two of the birds in the lineage died during a severe drought in 2003 and 2004. The remaining two birds, a sister and a brother, mated and their offspring has mated, but only with each other.

This has led to two distinct groups of medium ground finches on Daphne Major that do not mix, the Grants reported. They differ in weight, beak shape and song and breed in two different areas on the island.

(More in the Grants’ inaugural article in the 2009 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.)

Ryan Calsbeek

I didn’t feel kinship with female lizards until I listened to Ryan Calsbeek talk about women having a say in whether their children will be boys or girls.

Calsbeek has studied natural selection among lizards and spoke about his research Thursday at N.C. State University’s biology department. He is an assistant professor of biological sciences at Dartmouth College and a visitor at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham where he is working on a book.

Experiments he and his team have run with brown anoles, lizards native to Cuba and the Bahamas, suggest that the female lizards sort sperm to have the fittest males father more male offspring. It’s unclear how female brown anoles do that, Calsbeek said, but they’re not the only ones doing it.

“It’s even true in humans,” he said.

The remark generated quips from the audience about the exclusively female offspring of three consecutive U.S. presidents and the girl that Calsbeek’s pregnant wife is expecting. But Calsbeek argued that statistically four examples don’t mean much. Throughout history, women whose mates were presidents and kings tended to overproduce sons, he said.

Still, why should I care about sperm sorting among reptiles the size of my finger? Because brown anoles are, as Calsbeek put it, “the drosophila of lizards.” Both are model organisms. Just as the drosophila fruit fly has been extensively used to understand genetics, brown anoles can tell us something about the role female choice plays in the evolution of organisms, including ours, Calsbeek said.

Brown anole

More than 150 years ago, Charles Darwin picked up on female behavior patterns that ensure reproductive fitness down the generations.

Nature is full of examples. To a peacock hen lustrous tail feathers on a male signal he’s not parasite-ridden. Size and strength help male elephant seals drive away competitors and attract harems of up to 100 cows. Size is also important for female brown anoles to determine male fitness.

After World War II, another Brit, Angus Bateman, determined through drosophila experiments that female choice makes sense, because the number of offspring a female fruit flies can produce is limited more by how many eggs she generates than by how many mates she has. Bateman concluded that eggs are more precious than sperm, Calsbeek said.

Calsbeek and his team conducted breeding experiments with brown anoles to learn more about the choices the female lizards made. The findings they reported last year suggested the dams were very sophisticated.

The experiments showed that the size of the father only played a role in the number of male offspring that hatched.

Males are either losers or winners while females do pretty well regardless, Calsbeek said. “If you’re a loser in the animal kingdom, you’re probably a male. Sorry guys.”

As a first-time attendee and representative of Science in the Triangle, I divided my time between chasing down interviewees and attending panels, which were organized by participants on an online wiki.

One of those interviewees, Katie Mosher of NC Sea Grant, told me that she’d observed a coming together of science blogging and science journalism in the three years since she’d started attending ScienceOnline. More journalists are using the blog form either to replace or to supplement their print or broadcast stories, she said, some of them writing in traditional journalistic objective form and some of them adopting a point of view. Some of those journalists were present at the conference, just as she sees bloggers now attending conferences hosted by organizations like the National Association of Science Writers.

But journalists appeared to be outnumbered at the conference by scientists who blog (or tweet, or both). As a professional writer who frequently covers science, I should perhaps see these scientist-bloggers as competition. Not at all. To me, they are representative of a welcome trend in academics to communicate with the public about scientific findings and (sometimes controversially) the public policy implications of these findings. A scientist-blogger who writes well (perhaps one who attended the panel by Carl Zimmer and Ed Yong on avoiding obfuscation in science writing) and who knows how to attract an audience can have an immediate impact on public understanding of breaking news, as has been the case with the scientists at Deep-Sea News who covered science surrounding the Gulf oil spill. (Bora Zivkovic explains why scientists are such good explainers.)

A scientist-blogger takes some professional risks. Although I was unable to attend “Perils of Blogging as a Woman under a Real Name,” panelist Kate Clancy provides a detailed writeup here, which alludes to the skepticism with which academic colleagues and tenure and promotion panels view blogging and similar “soft” activities.

A scientist-blogger has to deal with certain downsides of being an online presence, most notably “cranks . . . who come onto our sites and leave comments that foment dissension rather than productive commentary,” according to Rick MacPherson, interim executive director and conservation programs director at the Coral Reef Alliance. It happens wherever evolution or climate change are discussed, he said, and he is the target for negative comments every time he writes or is interviewed about the role of climate change in sea level rise and ocean acidification, both threats to coral reefs.

According to MacPherson, the negative commenters are evidence that the general public doesn’t understand the evidence-based nature of science. “People don’t understand how science works,” he said. “It’s not a democratic process. . . . not opinions.”

His sentiments were echoed in “Lessons from Climategate” by panelist Chris Mooney, coauthor of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future, who listed these depressing statistics:

• only 18 percent of Americans know a scientist
• just 13 percent follow science and technology news
• 44 percent can’t name a scientific role model; those who can most frequently name Albert Einstein, Al Gore, and Bill Gates, two of whom are not scientists
• in every five hours of cable news, just one minute is devoted to science and technology

According to Mooney, the situation “is ripe for climate skeptics; they are well-trained, skilled communicators who exploit lack of public knowledge and are willing to fight hard in ways climate scientists are not.” His co-panelist Josh Rosenau, who works to defend the teaching of evolution at the National Center for Science Education, said that the language of the attacks against climate science has an eerie parallel in the attacks against evolution. “For 90 years we’ve been fighting same battle,” he said. “Public opinion has not moved. If that happens to climate change we are doomed.”

Mooney and Rosenau were joined on the panel by Thomas C. Peterson, chief scientist at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville. Peterson was one of the climate scientists whose emails were hacked and published just a few weeks before the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit. Although his role in the affair was minor, he was excoriated in blogs (Peterson reminds us that some “science” blogs are unsound scientifically), subjected to harassing calls and emails, and asked by a congressman to produce all emails on the topic (which he did, and which vindicated him). Yet he was still subsequently elected by his peers to be president of the World Meteorological Association’s Commission for Climatology. Clearly, in his professional circles, he is a rock star even if some of the public doesn’t think so.

For Peterson and his co-panelists, the implication is clearly that the public doesn’t understand scientists the way scientists do. Mooney said that the climate emails were taken out of context by people who don’t understand science or scientists. His solution: train “deadly ninjas of science communication”–people who can frame the message and convey science clearly to different constituencies. He wants good communicators to claim the vacancies created when CNN dumped its entire science reporting unit and when daily newspapers gradually reduced their science coverage.

That’s a space that good scientist-bloggers can occupy alongside professional writers: reporting on science from the trenches, bringing scientific research alive, demystifying the scientific method, and unveiling the wealth of unsound science out there.

Notes:

Read my colleague Sabine Vollmer’s post on credibility in science blogging here.

A great resource for finding science blogs is scienceblogging.org.

Brian Hare

Hare, an assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, says humans are apes.

Indeed, on the timeline that tracks the evolution of hominids, we are between chimpanzees and bonobos on the left and gorillas and orangutans on the right.

“Humans are slap dab in the middle of the great ape clade,” Hare said during a talk he gave Friday at N.C. State University’s biology department.

But wait a minute. We may share 98.7 percent of our genetic material with apes, but we’ve accomplished a lot more than they have. We speak and write books. We pray. We build cities and pay with money that’s part of a global financial system. We join different groups. We depose dictators. Apes live in trees. They grunt and scream. Their allegiances tend to be with one group only and they usually follow a strict ranking system.

To figure out how we humans got to be that way, researchers have begun to set up experiments with chimpanzees and bonobos, the apes most closely related to us. Hare’s research is based on these experiments. At Duke, for example, he has access to two sanctuaries, the Tchimpounga Natural Reserve in the Republic of Congo and Lola y Bonobo in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, a country formerly known as Zaire.

bonobo

What these first experiments suggest is that bonobos often behave differently than chimps and we sometimes behave like chimps and sometimes like bonobos.

When we go to a casino and gamble, we act like chimps. Unlike bonobos, chimps are risk-takers, according to a study published in 2008 and co-authored by Hare and two Duke students. When we share our ice cream cone, we act like bonobos. Hare and a Lola y Bonobo researcher found out not only humans voluntarily share their food, bonobos do, too, and they published the finding last year.

Evolutionary anthropologists believe we accomplished much of what we did as a species because we were particularly good at cooperating. In other words, we helped each other out, were tolerant of each other, knew how to negotiate and form relationships.

“It doesn’t matter that you’re super smart if you can’t get along,” is how Hare described it.

chimpanzee

A study published in 2006 that Hare also co-authored looked at how good chimps are at cooperating even though they cannot talk to each other.

The experiments used bananas, a favorite food. To get the bananas, two chimps in a cage had to simultaneously pull a rope, one at each end. Chimps who wanted all of the bananas themselves ended up with a rope. Pairs who were willing to share got bananas, as video recordings of the experiments showed.

The experiments also tested how aware chimps are of a joint effort and whether they can remember the best partner. In a series of trials, one chimp could either open a door to a second cage and let a partner in to share the bananas, or he could eat all of the bananas himself. A chimp left empty-handed after another partner had shared the bananas with him was clearly upset about the lack of cooperation. He jumped around flailing his arms.

“You make me lose my bananas,” Hare commented the video showing the upset chimp. He remembered a better partner and Hare’s commentary of the memory was, “Dude, you make bananas happen.”

Chimps can also negotiate, according to a study co-authored by Hare and published in 2009. Presented with a choice of equal or unequal portions of bananas, dominant chimps let subordinate chimps have an equal portion in up to 56 percent of the trials.

But present just one portion of bananas and chimps can’t solve the problem, Hare said. Bonobos can.

I have interviewed Vanessa last year so you can learn more about her there.

I received a review copy recently and am halfway through. Once I finish I will post my book review here.

From Publishers Weekly:

Devoted to learning more about bonobos, a smaller, more peaceable species of primate than chimpanzees, and lesser known, Australian journalist Woods and her fiancé, scientist Brian Hare, conducted research in the bonobos’ only known habitat—civil war–torn Congo. Woods’s plainspoken, unadorned account traces the couple’s work at Lola Ya Bonobo Sanctuary, located outside “Kinshasa in the 75-acre forested grounds of what was once Congo dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s weekend retreat. The sanctuary, founded in 1994 and run by French activist Claudine André, served as an orphanage for baby bonobos, left for dead after their parents had been hunted for bush meat; the sanctuary healed and nurtured them (assigning each a human caretaker called a mama), with the aim of reintroducing the animals to the wild. Hare had only previously conducted research on the more warlike, male-dominated chimpanzee, and needed Woods because she spoke French and won the animals’ trust; through their daily work, the couple witnessed with astonishment how the matriarchal bonobo society cooperated nicely using frequent sex, and could even inspire human behavior. When Woods describes her daily interaction with the bonobos, her account takes on a warm charm. Woods’s personable, accessible work about bonobos elucidates the marvelous intelligence and tolerance of this gentle cousin to humans.”

The main idea of the meeting is that evolutionary theory has something to offer in the realm of understanding human societies and thus shaping policies governing aspects of human activity. In the domain of economics, for example, it appears that the classical economics (i.e., the Chicago School) is unbeatable in the corridors of power. Yet, it is essentially faulty and this has been shown many times, including by numerous Nobel Prize winners in Economics. The idea that humans are rational (and perfectly informed) economic players is just plain wrong. Yet our economic policy is built upon that error. Perhaps developing and using models from evolutionary theory can finally bring the well-past-due overturn of the faulty economics and become the basis for smart, modern economic policies. The work is just beginning.

Perhaps the insights from the study of social and eusocial animals, mainly insects, can inform the discussion about social behavior of humans. How do simple rules for simple brains result in complex behaviors of, for example, bee swarms? Perhaps if we used such simple rules, instead of relying on every individual human being highly intelligent, impartial and rational, we can devise policies that will actually work, in various domains of human activity.

Taking into account multi-level selection models of evolution one can start understanding the differences between small-group societies (e.g, in rural areas) and large-group societies (e.g., in large cities), why those result in diefferent behaviors of individual humans living there, and why the differences between the two types of groups often lead to civil wars (often wars we usually do not see or describe as civil wars due to our own myopia, not realizing that a war between two adjacent regions may, in fact, be a war between the city and the country “mentality” – something quite obviously applicable to the US red vs. blue states, really small-town conservatism vs. big-city liberalism). Why imposing large-group organization (i.e., a President and a Parliament, i.e., a ‘centralized government’ of a unified country) may not work in a country like Afghanistan in which the society was always organized via local kin-and-friend networks – evolutionary theory can open our eyes on such questions.

This group of people, coming from a variety of backgrounds including history, anthropology, ecology, economics, psychology, political science, ethology and evolutionary biology, will try to tackle these and similar questions over the years to come. Interestingly, the meeting was apparently an Unconference (though they have never heard of the term before), with discussions starting some months before the event (I presume online), leading to the choices of topics actually discussed in sessions which were free-style discussions, not speeches.

One of the panelists noted that interdisciplinary meetings are usually excercises in misunderstanding, as each participant brings in different language and different axioms, but not this meeting – people actually made an effort, in advance, to study and learn other people’s perspectives before encountering them in the sessions in real life. This made the meeting, judging from the enthusiasm of all panelists, a resounding success.

This was the first time I ever visited NESCent (though I was excited when I first heard about its founding five years ago) and it was really nice to see Craig McClain and Robin Ann Smith again, as well as to meet, for the first time in real life, John Logsdon who blogs on Sex, Genes and Evolution and has come to NESCent for a nine-year sabbatical.

What is a projectile weapon? It is something that can be thrown far away – more than just a couple of meters – and with sufficient power to seriously injure or kill a large animal. A non-projectile weapon, even if it can be thrown with force to a shorter distance of a couple of meters, requires either ambush hunting or chasing the prey into a corner or a bog where it can be approached and stabbed from a close distance. A projectile weapon allows hunters to hunt out in the open, perhaps just hiding in the tall grass. Thus two types of weaponry target different kinds of prey.

But inventing projectile weapons requires refinement in technical skills of making them, technical skills in throwing them, and changes in anatomy to make projectile weapons effective. And once invented, projectile weapons have novel ecological impacts, including impacts on further cultural evolution of humans.

This is what Dr.Churchill is studying. He is focusing on Europe, the invention of projectile weapons by modern (“Cro-Magnon”) humans and lack of such invention in Neanderthals, how that impacted the ecological relationship between the two species, and how that contributed to Neanderthal extinction as well as extinction (through competitive exclusion, as well as direct competition by killing) of all the large European carnivores except wolves.

In the talk, Dr.Churchill surveyed several different aspects of his research. He is approaching the question from several different angles. One is the study of spear tips in the archaeological record – their shape and size, the weight, the aerodynamics of the shape, etc. all tell something about their use as either close-contact or projectile weapons. Some (rare) spear handles and spear-throwers tell their own stories.

Then there is the fossil record of humans, Neanderthals and other large carnivores that show numbers and geographical distributions, migrations and dates of extinctions.

Next, there are anatomical cues – skeleton is malleable during development and bones in the upper arm develop differently in cultures that use contact weapons versus those that use projectile weapons as the stabbing technique is different from the throwing technique – throwers have different torsion angles in the humerus and also the humerus of one arm gets thicker than that of the other arm – this pattern is found in humans, but not in Neanderthals.

Finally, the general shape of Neanderthals would make them strong stabbers but poor throwers, so even if they tried throwing (perhaps by seeing the spears used that way by modern humans) they would not have been effective hunters with that technique.

Then, there are wounds in the bones of some fossil humans and Neanderthals. By conducting an experiment – throwing spears into pig carcasses at various speeds, powers and distances (yes, throwing done by a machine) and analyzing the effects on bones – Churchill and his students could conclude that the wounds in the fossil bones were indeed the result of projectile weapons thrown from a distance.

The talk was, as is usually the case on these occasions, a quick survey of various studies. I did not read all the papers by him or his competitors, so I cannot write anything from a position of my own expertise. But my feeling is this: Each piece of evidence he showed is weak on its own, but put together they make a strong case. And the strength is not purely additive, i.e., in the sense that more data is stronger than fewer data. The strength comes from consilience. Let me try to explain how that works.

Let’s call his preferred hypothesis ‘Hypothesis A’. One piece of evidence he shows is consistent with Hypothesis A, and weakens (or eliminates) an alternative Hypothesis B, but is also strongly vulnerable to alternative Hypothesis C. Another piece of evidence is consistent with his Hypothesis A, and weakens an alternative Hypothesis C, but is also strongly vulnerable to alternative Hypothesis D. Yet another piece of evidence is consistent with his Hypothesis A, and weakens an alternative Hypothesis D, but is also strongly vulnerable to alternative Hypothesis B. When you look at all of his evidence together, all of it is consistent with Hypothesis A and all alternatives look weak. Thus with all pieces being individually weak, the whole edifice still looks very powerful.

Now, to make clear, Dr.Churchill pointed out several times that the research he focuses on, his Hypothesis A, is not the one and only explanation for the extinction of Neanderthals (and other large predators). He just asserts that it is an important component of the process that led to this result and perhaps a more important component than some other people in the field are ready to admit. Of course, that’s how science works: different people focus on different aspects of a problem, and the strength of each person’s data will determine how the whole picture is built in the end.

This was definitely an interesting talk on a topic I never thought about before. DeLene was also there and wrote her thoughts about the lecture on her blog Wild Muse as well as on the Science In The Triangle blog.

What dawned on me was the beginning of an understanding how the Internet can be so ephemeral and yet so powerful.

I realized that we can follow the nematode’s example and adapt to emerging technologies to further our knowledge exponentially or we can dig in and watch idly while cellphones, Facebook and Twitter change how society works. It’s all a matter of mindset, which we as humans can change thanks to evolution.

Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in New York University’s graduate interactive telecommunications program, lays out how the Internet is disrupting the hirarchical flow of knowledge. With cellphones, Facebook and Twitter everybody becomes a consumer and a producer. That means, information no longer is passed on from a producer to a select group of middlemen, such as journalists, who then distribute it to the consumers. Instead, information originates from multiple sources – including television, newspapers and magazines – and is distributed on the Internet. The multiple sources can then connect with each other and create more information.

To illustrate how different this Internet network of information producers and consumers is from the linear, top-to-bottom model, Shirky points out a successful Internet effort to monitor voting irregularities in the 2008 presidential election. In a reversal of technology transfer trends, the U.S. copied the idea from a less developed country, Nigeria, where it was deployed during an election a year or so earlier.

It seems to me that such a network of producers and consumers would perfectly suit science, which always struggles to solve more problems the more scientists know.

There is, of course, the pesky question whether an exploding amount of information automatically translates into better information. That’s where the book comes in.

Published last year by the California University Press, “Natural Security: A Darwinian Approach to a Dangerous World” is not only a novel approach to gathering scientific information, it also provides some astonishing insights.

The book was edited by Raphael D. Sagarin, associate director for ocean and coastal policy at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, and Terence Taylor, a former United Nations chief weapons of mass destruction inspector for Iran. In the book, Sagarin and Taylor bring together experts from different walks of scientific life, including marine biologists, an anthropologist, a paleontologist, security experts and a virus researcher, who look at ways nature has developed over millions of years to defend itself against ever-present dangers and what humans can learn from natural defense mechanisms.

The nematode, a worm of about 1,000 cells, is featured in the book, because it has a highly efficient and adaptive immune system that appears to be capable of protecting the worm from all known viral parasites. The nematode’s cells do that through RNA interference, a method that many researchers are currently trying to tap for drug development.

The book’s authors argue that natural defense mechanisms work because nature never puts all of her eggs in one basket. The nematode’s way is different from the ways of bacteria, which are different again from how bony fish or birds do it.

When nature has been able to advance its knowledge base by using multiple methods simultaneously, shouldn’t humans then be able to do the same? In that context, the Internet should reduce the risk of misinformation and improve human knowledge.

Afterall, humans are part of nature and its evolution – a point that is bolstered by brain research.

As the WSJ’s Hotz points out in his blog post, the human brain works better when we’re not single-minded. Brain scans show, he writes, that “our brain may be most actively engaged when our mind wanders and we’ve actually lost track of our thoughts. Left to its own devices, our brain activates several areas associated with complex problem solving, which researchers had previously assumed were dormant during daydreams. Moreover, it appears to be the only time these areas work in unison.”

Aha!