Men are under natural selection to become richer, according to a report in the November issue of American Naturalist. That’s right: the same way natural selection once encouraged longer necks in giraffes and duck bills on ducks (and platypuses), men are now feeling that Darwinian pull toward the corner office.
men strive for cultural goals such as wealth and status in order to convert these achievements into reproductive success.
Women showed the opposite effect: lower incomes were associated with more children (the researchers interpreted this as women giving up earning potential in order to have kids). All sorts of other interesting societal lessons cropped up in the study. The effect held across typical Western societies (the U.K., Sweden), in African hunter-gatherer societies, and in family records of Europeans spanning the last 500 years.
This research is kind of a brutal reminder that civilization doesn’t trump evolution, it just shifts the focus. Quasi-philosophical discussions about whether we’ve stopped evolving are fun, but there’s really only one right answer: Of course we’re still evolving.
Evolution is just the slow genetic shifting of the norms in a population. It happens to the best of species - even ones that have invented flu shots, indoor plumbing, and airbags. Case in point: I have terrible eyesight, but thanks to contact lenses I’ve avoided being eaten by wolves or walking off cliffs. So you might argue that our superb mammalian eyeballs have stopped evolving.
But I’m still childless. If I keel over tomorrow then, evolutionarily, I’ll have vanished.**** My genes will sink into the dirt along with the rest of the contents of my cells. Which of my genetic traits will be to blame? My enormous Anglo-Saxon cranium? The tendency to recite Monty Python on first dates? Too busy blogging to meet real people? Or my paltry earning power?
The point is that natural selection is at work, blindly weeding out genes, even if in less blood-curdling fashion than we often think of it. Of course, selection is only one of evolution’s three ingredients. To actually evolve, a population needs to be variable, different individuals must have differential reproductive success (that’s selection), and they must be able to pass those differences on to their offspring (that’s heritability). But all those are met, the researchers argue: just ask the Kennedys.
Presumably we’re not evolving some kind of Susan B. Anthony-producing sweat gland, of course. But more subtle abilities (or predispositions) to accumulate wealth are being rewarded with more children. And although evolution takes a long time, the results from this study suggest this selective pressure is as old as the barter system. I wonder what exaggerated features it has already produced, giraffe- or peacock-like, in our bodies and our psyches?
(Image: courtesy Matt Schwartz. disclaimer: enormous cranium notwithstanding, that’s not me in the picture)
***Except for whatever I have in common with my nephews and nieces.
The science news last week was peppered with common-sense breakthroughs: among them, an elephant-rampage early-warning system and a hospital centrifuge made from a hand-cranked eggbeater.
It’s a good time for modest ingenuity to make a comeback, since our plummeting economic fortunes are dampening enthusiasm for, say, an $8 billion physics project that keeps getting the hiccups - or even a $450 million Mars landing that goes off flawlessly. So clip the following coupons to get great science at discount prices:
Hand-powered blood sample prep: Transporting a delicate medical centrifuge to a remote village to fight infectious disease is tricky enough, not to mention the problem of finding an electrical outlet once you get there. Sure, you could carry in your own generator and diesel fuel, or you could collect blood samples, put them on ice, and ship them to the nearest hospital. But a team of Harvard researchers thought up a much more satisfying option (I like to think it was over an omelette breakfast). Start with a $2 hand-powered eggbeater. Remove one of the beaters and tape your blood sample to the other one. Crank. Even untrained helpers can hit 1,200 rpm, the team reported in the journal Lab on a Chip- plenty to separate blood cells from the plasma doctors need for running diagnostic tests.
Elephants own up to mischief by text message: In some parts of Africa elephants are still being mercilessly poached for their ivory, but elsewhere they raid fields, destroying crops and engendering ill will. Twenty-four-hour elephant surveillance, a la the black helicopters in Goodfellas, is hardly an option. Instead, rangers attach radio-collars to troublemaker elephants. When a geolocator in the radio-collar realizes the elephant is headed for a farm field, it text messages the rangers so they can warn it away.
And finally, we learn that worms hate the sound of moles. They come writhing out of the ground by the spaghetti-load at a mole’s merest murmur - or the reasonable approximations performed by “worm-grunters.” (OK, so this breakthrough isn’t as practical as the eggbeater centrifuge. It’s a great piece of experimental science - and who knows what it could do for the bait-worm economy?)
Wired Science noted the story first, and pointed out that Charles Darwin himself had thought through the problem in his exhaustive tome on earthworms. He proposed moles as the cause - but it took another 120 years or so for someone to put together the proper experiment.
The thing I love about “common sense” breakthroughs is that they’re only common sense after somebody thinks of them. Until then, we just have pieces of a solution arrayed in front of us, hiding in plain sight. Makes me wonder what kind of discoveries are in my own kitchen. And where I can get some of that ingenuity.
Barring an observation or two about how science is or isn’t cropping up in this campaign, the Gist is not a political blog. But as someone who still remembers sixth-grade planetarium visits where I craned my neck against the theater seats to watch the stars wheel by, I do feel a responsibility to speak up about a recent instance of planetarium-bashing.
What prompts me to post about it now is McCain’s decision to repeat the mischaracterization in the third presidential debate, last night. McCain’s aversion to pork barrels and earmarks is laudable, and with so many of them floating around in the federal budget, I just don’t understand his determination to dump on the defenseless and lovable planetariums of the world.
As a visit to your local planetarium will affirm (try the Smithsonian’s Einstein Planetarium if you’re in D.C.), that lens-studded spherical contraption that faithfully projects the night sky onto the ceiling is a far cry from the overhead projector your 11th-grade history teacher chronicled the Reconstruction on with smelly blue markers.
Granted, for $28 you can order a home planetarium complete with nine revolving planets that runs on AA batteries - but something tells me the light bulb on it is not quite up to snuff. A few thousand more can get you an ingenious inflatable planetarium, but it maxes out with considerably less than a school-bus-full of kids.
To run a world-class planetarium that brings the mysteries of space to millions of visitors, day in and decade out - as at Chicago’s 78-year-old Adler Planetarium, I think that going with a name brand qualifies as money well spent.
Now, if we can just leave the science educators out of the earmark wars, perhaps we can concentrate on what the candidates say about the other $699,997,000,000 that has the country so worried?
(Image: Google Earth/NASA; it’s a patch of sky directly above the Gist and dead in the center of the constellation Leo. It is mesmerizing to zoom deeper and deeper into space in this program - the stars just keep on coming. You should try it in a planetarium.)
A bit of household science in the New York Times this week has wrecked my decades-old reverence for the cast-iron skillet. That’s according to data from the kitchen of Harold McGee, the great foodie-chemist and author of On Food and Cooking - a book that’s nearly as important to your kitchen as a decent chef’s knife.
McGee decided to settle a question that I thought I knew the answer to: In pans, what material handles heat best? He tested five skillets ranging in price from trusty $25 cast iron, through various mid-range varieties of aluminum, on up to a steel-coated copper pan that topped $400.
Now, I’ve always felt a kind of earthy piety when cooking with my trusty cast-iron skillet, which is going on 15 years old. Whether it’s delicately crisping a grilled cheese or setting off the smoke detectors over blackened salmon, I’ve always congratulated myself for sticking with its old-fashioned, even-heating perfection in the face of modern nonstickiness, metallurgical trickery, and charming pastel enamels.
So imagine my surprise. McGee’s “point and shoot” thermometer (forget new pans, I want one of those) indicated the cast iron pan was 100 degrees cooler at its edges than in the center. Pretty much every other pan design heated more evenly (and most more quickly) than cast iron. At first I didn’t want to believe, but the accompanying photos of toasted parchment were devastating.
Along the way, McGee discovered why butter does a better job than oil at keeping food from sticking, and turned up a principle called Bénard-Margoni convection to explain the ripples that appear in hot oil and look like the “legs” in wine running down a glass.
Three of McGee’s skillets had nonstick coatings - something I’ve sworn off. They’re a Catch-22 of annoyances: First, food always sticks to nonstick coatings. And second, you have to spend the rest of the evening waving a limp plastic scrubby at the problem for fear of further damaging the coating that doesn’t work in the first place. (Sure enough, McGee saw nicks appear in the nonstick armor of two pans during his experiments.)
Which leaves my only remaining point of pride with cast iron: When you do hopelessly burn a quesadilla, frittata, or korma into the bottom of your pan, you can at least attack it with steel wool and elbow grease.
The 2008 electoral campaign has now brought us three debates. After 270 minutes of argument, the word “science” or “scientists” has been used approximately four times.
That would be three times in the first presidential debate*** (transcript), zero times in the vice-presidential standoff, despite the candidates being asked point-blank their views on climate change and its causes (transcript), and approximately once in the second debate.****
Perhaps we’ve reached the point where science is so ingrained in our culture that we don’t need to say its name. All four candidates spent plenty of time on economics and energy independence - two areas in which science and its city cousin, technology, are the bedrock of the discussion.
But then, if we don’t ever talk about science, how do we maintain or regain our country’s focus on scientific literacy, and train new experts in science’s ever-shifting frontiers? The words “education,” “teachers,” and “students” have been almost as rare in debate transcripts as science.
At least we can thank the National Science Foundation and Science magazine for encouraging people to think of new ways to imagine it. Their six-year-old Visualization Challenge rewards scientists and science outreach for finding compelling images and videos to get people to pay attention to research. The 2008 winners were announced at the end of September.
Above, the winner in photography is an electron micrograph of katydid-colored diatoms clinging to a hair-sized invertebrate in the Mediterranean Sea. Diatoms like these may produce as much as 40 percent of the world’s oxygen.
Points for whimsy go to a beetle’s tea party depicted in “Alice’s Adventures in Microscopic Wonderland,” the winner in Informational Graphics. Other memorable images show word linkages in the Bible and Op-art results of an experiment in polymer science.
I particularly loved the attempt by some German computer scientists to describe the shortcomings of current virus protection software and propose a next-generation solution. The team won an honorable mention in Non-Interactive Media for their cartoon short “Smarter than the Worm.” It’s charming to watch and so simply explained that you’re almost fooled into thinking you knew this material already. But you probably didn’t.
Here’s the vaguely Where the Wild Things Are-ish YouTube video, in English, for Smarter than the Worm. Watch it… then consider telling your politicians you’re ready for a renewed emphasis on science research and education.
Previous years’ Visualization Challenge winners are here.
(Image: NSF/Mario de Stefano/Second University of Naples)
***For the record, all three times by Barack Obama.
****This was when Obama noted that scientists were present at the start of the computing industry and implied we would need them again as we reshape the energy industry.
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