The Chicago Blog: Biology Archives

July 12, 2011

The economics of fairness, or pass the lutefisk

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Natalie Angier is a science journalist—and an outspoken athiest—with a thirst for. . . . fairness? At least that's the case in her recent piece for the New York Times, in which she explores the wealth gap that's helped spur our worst economic crisis since the Great Depression in light of research on human nature and the evolution of human social organization. Interesting to point out that another NYT study bills the average top executive's salary at ten million dollars and rising twelve percent per year.

And just who's fair?

Angier spells it out for us:

Darwinian-minded analysts argue that Homo sapiens have an innate distaste for hierarchical extremes, the legacy of our long nomadic prehistory as tightly knit bands living by veldt-ready team-building rules: the belief in fairness and reciprocity, a capacity for empathy and impulse control, and a willingness to work cooperatively in ways that even our smartest primate kin cannot match.

In The Fair Society: The Science of Human Nature and the Pursuit of Social Justice, Peter Corning draws on evidence similar to what Angier cites in her article: the evolutionary record, along with the latest findings from the behavioral and biological sciences. The result? A provocative argument for the innate fairness of human beings, and the advancement of a new Biosocial Contract that takes lessons akin to those gleaned from the Kung bushmen of the Kalahari and the Ache hunter-gatherers in eastern Paraguay and applies them to the Madoffs and Enrons in our midst.

Is capitalism at a crisis point? Angier uncovers a study "in which Americans were given the chance to construct their version of the optimal wealth gradient for America." Both Republicans and Democrats ended up with a chart with a degree of income inequality that looked much more like Sweden's than that of the United States.

Chimpanzees might not carry a log together, but I've seen a conspicuous consumer or two lend a hand in understanding Ikea's cart-schlepping escalator. Corning reminds us there are real reasons why we might band together and build that Expedit shelving system arm-in-arm:

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May 27, 2011

TRAFFIC: Carl Zimmer and Penny Chisholm

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Welcome back to TRAFFIC, a Chicago Blog series featuring leading figures from across the humanities and sciences, whose prescient views on current events help us to interpret contemporary culture. We'll be ending a month of Friday TRAFFIC features, led by popular science writer Carl Zimmer, with one final conversation about ocean-borne viruses with Penny Chisholm.

Sallie W. "Penny" Chisholm is the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies and professor of biology at MIT. Her research lab seeks to advance our understanding of the ecology and evolution of microbes in the oceans, and how they influence global biochemical cycles. In January 2010, she was awarded the Alexander Agassiz Medal, for "pioneering studies of the dominant photosynthetic organisms in the sea and for integrating her results into a new understanding of the global ocean."

A Billion Viruses in the Sea

Dear Carl,

Thank you for giving viruses the recognition they deserve. As you point out, the discovery of viruses in the oceans is relatively recent. It seems that about once every decade there are similar major discoveries in oceanography that change the way we think about ocean ecosystems. One of these—a discovery by the late John Martin—was that iron availability limits the growth of phytoplankton (your 'geoengineers') over large regions of the oceans. This changed the major 'drivers' of carbon dioxide absorption by the oceans, and climate models had to be changed accordingly.

Evidence that iron—carried from land to ocean via atmospheric dust—limits the ocean's capacity to draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere has fueled the idea that large scale ocean iron fertilization could be used for engineering Earth's climate. What does this have to do with viruses (you are wondering)? Well, it turns out that iron has been used to flocculate viruses for wastewater treatment, and to concentrate them from ocean water for scientific study. What if iron dust deposition does the same in the oceans? What if it not only stimulates phytoplankton growth, but also reduces phytoplankton death rates by 'precipitating viruses' and settling them out of the system? Might this phenomenon help explain the observed relationships between iron dust deposition and atmospheric carbon dioxide in ice cores? This has been proposed by MIT's Hyman Hartman, who has also suggested that we might enhance phytoplankton's capacity to draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by (somehow) killing off viruses in the oceans. I doubt he is truly serious. But I also doubted the seriousness, twenty years ago, of people proposing ocean iron fertilization (OIF) as a means of carbon sequestration. Today, research on OIF for geoengineering is endorsed by leading scientists.

phytoplankton

Whether or not one takes seriously the idea of global geoengineering with anti-virals, a thought experiment along these lines quickly exposes the complexity of marine microbial systems (give it a try!). In fact, recent field experiments have revealed one of the many possible unexpected consequences; it turns out that when you reduce all the viruses in a sample of seawater you actually decrease the carbon fixation of cyanobacteria, because reduced lysis of heteotrophic bacteria deprives cyanobacteria of essential nutrients they need to grow optimally. In a nutshell, even these simple microbial systems are so complex that it is impossible to predict the consequences of removal of one component.

Just some food for thought.

Penny

Dear Penny:

It is funny how what at first seems absurd when it comes to virus can eventually become conventional wisdom. The very idea that the ocean harbored many viruses was absurd as late as the 1980s. Seawater just seemed like a terrible place for viruses to survive. But when scientists began to give a close look at the ocean, they discovered otherwise. A single spoonful of seawater might harbor a billion viruses. Most of those viruses proved to be bacteriophages—in other words, they infect bacteria. That's not surprising, because the most abundant hosts in the oceans are microbes. But what is surprising is the effect that those marine phages have on life in the sea. Viruses kill half of all the bacteria in the oceans every day. As you note, the rupturing of all those cells (known as lysis) dumps vast supplies of nutrients into the ocean, possibly fertilizing other microbes to grow faster. Since the microbes of the ocean pull down huge amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (and also return a lot of it back there), the overall effect that viruses have on the climate could potentially be huge. I can't help but find the idea of viruses influencing the climate a bit absurd—but the more I learn about viruses in the ocean, the more accustomed I get to it.

CroV, the ocean's largest microbe

Your speculations about viral geoengineering bring a fitting close to the discussions we've been having on this blog over the past month. Once scientists discovered viruses, they began to acquire the power to control them. They were able to develop vaccines and public health measures that could sometimes slow their spread. In many cases, we've only had moderate success in controlling viruses, but in a few case—such as those of smallpox and rinderpest—we are now at the point where we could soon eradicate entire species of virus from the face of the Earth.

But the discovery of viruses has also revealed to us that they are not merely things that make us sick and must be eradicated. Phages can kill life-threatening bacteria, for example. For now, however, phage therapy is not standard medical procedure, in part because governments are a bit queasy about approving viruses as living drugs. As your MIT colleague Tim Lu explained last week, he's taking his research in a different direction, using phages to destroy the biofilms that grow in heating and cooling systems in buildings. In effect, he's trying to heal architecture.

It's a natural progression from bodies to buildings to the entire planet. At least it's natural to speculate about using anti-virals to change the global climate. Still, I can't help but think—what kind of drug store could fill that prescription?

Carl

For more info on A Planet of Viruses, please visit the book's UCP page here.

This blog and the book A Planet of Viruses are part of the World of Viruses project, funded by the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health through the Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA), Grant No. R25 RR024267. Additional materials, including those directed at a K-12 audience, can be found on the World of Viruses website.

May 20, 2011

TRAFFIC: Carl Zimmer and Timothy Lu

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Welcome back to TRAFFIC, a Chicago Blog series featuring leading figures from across the humanities and sciences, whose prescient views on current events help us to interpret contemporary culture. We're delighted to continue this month's Friday TRAFFIC features, led by popular science writer Carl Zimmer. This week Zimmer welcomes MIT scientist Timothy Lu to talk about the quest to use viruses to cure infectious diseases.

Timothy Lu is assistant professor of electrical engineering at MIT, where he heads the Synthetic Biology Group. Carl wrote a profile of Lu last year in Technology Review.

All About Phage Therapy

Dear Carl:

Bacteriophages are the most abundant biological particles on earth, but due to their size, and perhaps ubiquity, most of us don't think of them very often. Phages are essentially just bacterial viruses. When it comes to viruses, the popular notion is that they are bad entities that are responsible for disease and suffering. The truth is, however, that phages are very different from human viruses. Phages do not infect human cells and are not responsible for the viral diseases that plague mankind, such as AIDS, herpes, cervical cancer, and the common cold. Furthermore, phages have had a tremendous impact on modern biology and biotechnology.

Much of our early scientific efforts to understand genetic regulation were carried out in the humble phage. Phage proteins called recombinases are an integral component for the construction of "knockout animals," which cannot express particular genes—an indispensable tool in modern biological research. Phage display, a technique for sticking a library of peptides on phage surfaces and panning for targets to which these peptides will bind, has been used to make nanowires for batteries, identify new antibodies to treat human diseases, and understand the basic science which underlie protein-protein interactions.

Despite their importance as major research tools in the biomedical community, however, research into the use of phages as human therapeutics has garnered a mixed reputation in the Western world. Soon after their discovery in the early twentieth century, phages were tried as novel antimicrobial agents. Indeed, one can imagine the excitement that the early phage researchers must have experienced when observing the lysis—or clearing of bacterial cultures—by the addition of a newly discovered biological agent!

a bacteriophage

However, early reports claiming impressive successes at treating bacterial infections with phages were later tempered by failures in other settings and repeated trials.

Looking back, it is likely that a lack of detailed understanding of phage biology was responsible for much of these failures. Unlike antibiotics, which act like broad-spectrum bombs that blast all bacteria, good or bad, in their paths, phages are targeted warriors, the biological equivalent of a sniper or laser-guided missile. This targeted behavior is beneficial because it avoids killing bacteria which are good for us, as opposed to antibiotics which cause collateral damage. However, this targeted behavior also has its flaws because to effectively treat a specific bacterial contamination with phages, one must understand the bacterial compositions in detail and know what mixture of phages to use against them. Such capabilities were not available or known during the early days of phage therapy.

Thus, the subsequent discovery of antibiotics, along with their simplicity and miracle successes, largely displaced phages from antimicrobial research in Western medicine in the latter half of the twentieth century. As a result, the notion of phage therapy often elicits justifiable skepticism when discussed as an alternative to antibiotics today, even though the antibiotics pipeline has dried up and we are in desperate need of new strategies to combat the rising tide of antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

Fortunately, in the past few decades, there has been a renaissance brewing in the phage world. Commercial, government, and academic labs have begun to tackle the fundamental issues that have held back phage therapy using rigorous molecular tools. To use phages to effectively treat bacterial contaminations, these labs have been developing technologies for classifying bacterial populations, identifying the right combination of phages to use, and optimizing phage properties using evolutionary or engineering approaches.

Instead of tackling the high hurdles that need to be crossed for direct human use, many labs and companies have chosen to apply phages to other applications in industrial, environmental, and diagnostic settings. For example, Intralytix makes phages to treat listeria contaminations of food, Omnilytix makes phages that control bacterial infections on tomatoes and peppers, and Microphage makes phages that can detect and report on the presence of harmful antibiotic-resistant superbugs, such as MRSA. A company called Novophage is advancing the use of phages for industrial applications, where they have the potential to enhance energy inefficiency and decrease biofouling (for full disclosure, I am a founder of this startup). Major advantages of phages compared with chemical biocides and pesticides include greater biocompatibility and decreased environmental toxicity. Using natural biological particles to combat biological problems is consistent with our society's continuous drive to reduce the use of harmful chemicals and is, I believe, a great application for phages in the modern era of biotechnology.

The hurdle that has yet to be overcome is the use of phages for human therapeutics, the original application area for phage therapy. Nonetheless, given the great need for new antimicrobial therapies and the inroads that these laboratories have been making into optimizing phages for practical applications, the prospect of effective phage therapy being applied to human infectious diseases in Western medicine seems to be growing!

Tim

Dear Tim:

In all my work as a science writer, I can't think of a story as strange as the history of phage therapy. It's been nearly a century since the Canadian physician Felix d'Herelle discovered viruses that infect bacteria. And yet, despite great promise, phage therapy has yet to become a mainstay of medicine.

What makes the story even stranger is that Herelle could see the promise of phage therapy as soon as he discovered the viruses. He was soon using them to treat dysentery and cholera. When four passengers on a French ship in the Suez Canal came down with bubonic plague, Herelle gave them phages. All four victims recovered. He went on to conduct large-scale public health campaigns for the British government in colonial India. Phage therapy became so well-known that Herelle inspired the central character in Sinclair Lewis's 1925 best-selling novel Arrowsmith. Phage therapy became big business: Herelle developed commercial drugs that were sold by the company that's now known as L'Oreal, which were used to treat skin wounds and to cure intestinal infections.

Felix d'Herelle

But by the time he died in 1949, Herelle had sunk into obscurity. Doctors had abandoned phage therapy for antibiotics. His dream did not vanish entirely, however. On his travels, Herelle met Soviet scientists who wanted to set up an entire institute for research on phage therapy. In 1923 Herelle helped establish the Eliava Institute of Bacteriophage, Microbiology, and Virology in Tbilisi, which is now the capital of the Republic of Georgia. At its peak, the institute employed 1200 people to produce tons of phages. In World War II, the Soviet Union shipped phage powders and pills to the front lines, where they were dispensed to infected soldiers.

Soviet scientists continued to investigate phage therapy after World War II. They conducted the best trial of the viruses in 1963. They enrolled 30,769 children in Tbilisi. Once a week, about half the children swallowed a pill that contained phages against dysentery. The other half of the children got a pill made of sugar. To minimize the influence of the environment as much as possible, the Eliava scientists gave the phage pill only to children who lived on one side of each street, and the sugar pill to the children who lived on the other side. The Eliava scientists followed the children for 109 days. Among the children who took the sugar pill, 6.7 out of every 1,000 got dysentery. Among the children who took the phage pill, that figure dropped to 1.8 per 1,000. In other words, taking phages caused a 3.8-fold decrease in a child's chance of getting dysentery.

Phage therapy only began to attract interest in the West after the fall of the Soviet Union, when Soviet scientists could communicate more freely with the rest of the world. And yet, as you point out, the U.S. government has been leery of approving viruses for medical treatments. Gone are the days when a physician like Herelle could pretty much do as he pleased. As a result, many companies and investors are reluctant to embrace his phages.

If phage therapy can leap over these hurdles, I think that there are a vast number of potential applications. Treating a skin infection is just the start. Phages, after all, are part and parcel of every person's inner ecology. Our bodies are home to 100 trillion bacteria and other microbes. Recent surveys estimate that these microbes play host to about four trillion phages, which come in about 1,500 different species. In some cases, our phages kill their hosts, and thus maintain an ecological balance in our mouths, noses, guts, and other nooks and crannies. In other cases, phages insert genes into their microbial hosts, giving them new powers.

The human microbiome is not merely an infestation we tolerate. It plays many different roles in our bodies. Microbes synthesize vitamins for us, regulate how much energy we get from our food, fight off invading pathogens, nurture our immune system, and potentially even influence our behavior. It may be possible to manipulate the microbiome through the phages that have coevolved with it for millions of years.

Carl

Stay tuned for next Friday's installment of TRAFFIC, featuring a conversation between Zimmer and Sallie Chisholm on the nature of ocean viruses. And for more info on A Planet of Viruses, please visit the book's UCP page here.

May 12, 2011

TRAFFIC: Carl Zimmer and Richard Preston

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Welcome back to TRAFFIC, a Chicago Blog series featuring leading figures from across the humanities and sciences, whose prescient views on current events help us to interpret contemporary culture. We're delighted to continue this month's Friday TRAFFIC features, led by popular science writer Carl Zimmer. This week Zimmer welcomes Richard Preston, New Yorker contributor and bestselling author, for a conversation on smallpox and the possible eradication of other viruses.

Richard Preston is the author of seven books, including The Hot Zone, The Cobra Event, and The Demon in the Freezer. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, and his awards include the American Institute of Physics Award and the National Magazine Award. Preston also the only person who isn't a medical doctor ever to receive the Centers for Disease Control's Champion of Prevention Award for public health.

Should Smallpox Be Put To Death?

Dear Carl:

There's a debate in the scientific community about what to do with the remaining stocks of smallpox virus on the planet. Should the virus be preserved so that it can be studied? Or should the virus be destroyed, so that—in theory at least—it would become extinct and would not threaten the human species again?

Smallpox virus, or Variola major, is the cause of probably the worst infectious disease in human history. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, experts believe that smallpox killed half a billion people, accounting for far more deaths than all the wars of the time. Smallpox is a grisly and supremely painful disease. The disease has around a 33 percent case-fatality rate in unvaccinated patients. That is, a third of the disease's victims who haven't been vaccinated die. The victims suffer from an incredibly painful rash—blisters known as pustules stud the body. The survivors are typically left with scars for life. About ten percent of fatal smallpox cases consist of hemorrhagic smallpox, a manifestation of the disease in which the victim dies with hemorrhagic symptoms, including bleeding from the orifices. Smallpox virus spreads in the air from person to person, traveling in tiny droplets spewed when an infected person speaks or coughs. The vast majority of the world's population today has little or no immunity to smallpox, because vaccination ceased during the 1970s.

Smallpox was declared eradicated globally in 1980 by the World Health Organization (WHO), after a remarkable and heroic WHO-led effort to eradicate the virus worldwide. Today, the only remaining samples of live smallpox virus are stored in just two locations: a high-security lab at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, and in the Vector State Research Center in Siberia, Russia. For a number of years, now, various member nations of the WHO have been pressing the WHO to order those stocks destroyed.

The smallpox virus stock at the CDC occupies a volume about the size of a basketball; the virus samples are frozen in small plastic tubes the size of pencil stubs. The Russian stock is probably similar. It would be very easy to destroy the virus: just heat it up.

But should it be destroyed? A series of defectors from the old Soviet Union have revealed that the Soviet Union weaponized smallpox; that the virus was a mainstay of the clandestine Soviet biowarfare program. Illicit stocks of smallpox may have been taken out of Russia; nobody knows where the virus might exist on earth today in the form of undisclosed, secret stocks of the virus.

Researchers using live smallpox virus at the CDC have been studying the virus in an effort to develop antiviral drugs that would be effective against a smallpox infection. The drugs might also be effective against genetically engineered smallpox.

The genome sequence of smallpox virus is publicly available and can be downloaded from the Internet. Some day it will probably be technically feasible to recreate live smallpox from its genome sequence. Even if all the living smallpox were destroyed, it might be brought back to life in a lab somewhere, some day.

D. A. Henderson, who led the WHO eradication of smallpox, argues that the virus should be destroyed, regardless of whether it can be recreated. He argues that if the WHO makes smallpox extinct, then anyone who later had the live virus would be committing a crime against humanity and could be prosecuted in international courts.

On the other hand, researchers who are developing defenses against smallpox argue that the disease is simply too dangerous to destroy; they argue that we must continue to study it under the principle of Sun Tzu, "Know thy enemy."

What do you think?

Richard

Dear Richard:

Your question is a timely one. On May 16, the World Health Organization will be having their annual meeting, and one of the items on their agenda is a global consensus about what to do with the world's remaining smallpox stocks.

If WHO does decide on eradication, it will be an historical moment. We humans have only eliminated two viruses from the wild. Smallpox was the first. The second, as of last October, is rinderpest, a devastating scourge of cattle. For now, both smallpox and rinderpest remain in laboratory stocks. But if WHO decides to get rid of the smallpox lab stocks, too, the virus may be eliminated from the planet.

The prospect of such a milestone raises the question of why we haven't been able to wipe out any of the other viruses that plague us. In some cases, it's because viruses have escape routes. In 2004, for example, SARS burst on the scene, killing 774 people in total before quarantines and other public health measures beat it back. There have been no reported cases of SARS since then in humans, but SARS is probably thriving. It spread from animal hosts—bats and civets—to humans, and it doubtless retreated back to them.

Some viruses are hard to eradicate because they're lurkers. HIV takes years to produce symptoms, making it hard to recognize and treat infected people. By the time it makes itself known, people may have spread it to many other victims. And doctors still lack vaccines for HIV and many other viruses.

SARS virus

In all these respects, smallpox is a peculiar virus. Unlike SARS, smallpox only infects humans. Unlike HIV, smallpox makes itself known in a matter of days. It's also unusual in that there's a cheap, effective smallpox vaccine. Combined, these three factors made it possible to effectively break the transmission cycle of smallpox and thereby drive it towards extinction.

Whenever a species goes extinct, we lose the opportunity to get to know it better. I'm sure no one would shed a tear at the extinction of smallpox, but, as you note, there's a lot we still don't understand about the virus. I don't think getting the opportunity to try people for crimes against humanity is worth giving up the chance to learn more about smallpox.

Even if smallpox never rears its ugly head again, that knowledge could still be valuable. Studies on smallpox DNA suggest that it evolved just a few thousand years ago from a pox that infected African rodents. Many closely related pox strains infect animals today, and they have plenty of chances to evolve into a new human pox. In 2003, for example, people in the Midwest came down with monkeypox, an African virus that is closely related to smallpox. It was baffling at first that an African pox could infect American victims. Eventually public health workers determined that the victims got the virus from prairie dogs they all bought at the same Missouri pet store.

If smallpox can help us prepare for the next pox, we should resist the urge to annihilate it.

Carl

Stay tuned for next Friday's installment of TRAFFIC, featuring a conversation between Zimmer and Timothy Lu on phage therapy. And for more info on A Planet of Viruses, please visit the book's UCP page here.

May 03, 2011

TRAFFIC: Carl Zimmer and W. Ian Lipkin

Welcome to TRAFFIC, a series exclusive to the Chicago Blog presenting an exchange of thoughts between leading figures from across the humanities and sciences, whose prescient views on current events help us to interpret contemporary culture. We're delighted to begin a month's worth of Friday TRAFFIC posts helmed by popular science writer Carl Zimmer in collaboration with some of our most acclaimed virologists, immunologists, and scientifically minded journalists.

Please join us for the next four weeks in welcoming discussions on virology and immunology with W. Ian Lipkin, director of the Center for Infection and Immunity; small pox with Richard Preston, New Yorker writer and bestselling author; phage therapy with Timothy Lu, inventor and Novophage founder; and ocean viruses with Sallie Chisholm, biological oceanographer and marine science expert.

With that in mind, join us for our first TRAFFIC exchange with Zimmer and Lipkin below:

jacket image The New York Times calls Carl Zimmer “as fine a science essayist as we have.” In his widely admired books, essays, and blogs, Zimmer charts the frontiers of biology. Booklist acclaimed his most recent title A Planet of Viruses as “absolutely top-drawer popular science writing.” Zimmer is a lecturer at Yale University, where he teaches writing about science and the environment. He is also the first Visiting Scholar at the Science, Health, and Environment Reporting Program at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. W. Ian Lipkin, MD, is the director of the Center for Infection and Immunity, John Snow Professor of Epidemiology, and professor of neurology and pathology in the Mailman School of Public Health and the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. His specialty is detecting new viruses and testing links between viruses and diseases. In A Planet of Viruses, Zimmer describes Lipkin's discovery of West Nile Virus in the United States, as well as his work uncovering hidden strains of the common cold. Zimmer also profiled Lipkin in November 2010 for the New York Times.

Dear Carl,

I just finished A Planet of Viruses. It's a compelling read that explores new frontiers in microbe hunting and the complex path from disease association to disease causation, a path we have not fully traveled. As with any book there are holes to be filled; nonetheless, this is an excellent roadmap!

We typically think of viruses as pathogens, but there is abundant and increasing evidence that they had an important and positive role in our evolution as mammals and the planet we live in. Retroviruses, a special kind of RNA virus of which HIV is the most famous, intercalate their genetic code into their host's. When host cells replicate their DNA, the virus replicates with it. If the virus makes its way to a sperm or egg cell, the virus wins the (rare) opportunity to get passed on from parent to child, over and over again. These genetic infiltrators, known as endogenous retroviruses, have integrated themselves into mammalian genomes over millions of years. They activate genes during pregnancy to produce proteins that prevent rejection of a fetus as a foreign body, likely facilitating the evolution of the placenta and live birth. Marine viruses, known as bacteriophages, which are the most abundant viruses on earth, shape our ecosystem by infecting and lysing bacteria in deep-sea sediment, thus affecting how nutrients are recycled.

virology-electron-micrograph-herpes-simplex-viruses-acute-eruption-blisters.jpg

Initiatives like the Human Microbiome Project, which surveys the human body's resident microorganisms and how they interact with our genes to influence health and disease, have mostly focused on bacteria. However, scientists cannot continue to ignore viruses, fungi, and other bugs! Traditionally, we have focused on bacteria because they are easy to clone, allowing us to replicate parts of their genome that may shed light on our own evolution. With the advent of newer and “sexier” technologies like virus detection microchips and high throughput sequencing, we can turn our attention to studying our interactions with viruses in more detail. As we learn more about the viruses in our gastrointestinal and respiratory tracts, I will be very much surprised if there are no helpful inhabitants among them.

Stay tuned!

Carl, you also discuss zoonotic diseases like AIDS, influenza, SARS, and Ebola, but let's not forget that how investigators decide where and when to sample for potential pathogens is also important. Hotspot modeling allows us to target surveillance efforts to ‘hot spots’ for human disease—the areas where human pathogens are most likely to emerge. The EcoHealth Alliance is a pioneer in this field and an advocate for the idea of One Health, which promotes collaboration among environmental scientists, vets, and clinicians.

And what about those curious about how microbe hunters do what we do? What are the platforms we use to find known and novel agents? How do we prove relationship to disease (or equally important, disprove a causative relationship)? Carl, let's give them directions! The work we do the Center for Infection and Immunity helps to answer some of those queries. We provide links to papers and interviews that address these challenges as well as video demonstrations of some relevant technologies

Last (but not least), as this is not a peer reviewed publication, and I have been encouraged to let my imagination run free, I wonder whether you might consider a chapter in a potential sequel focused on how microbes may alter host behavior to enhance their growth and dissemination. For example, rabies is associated with the inability to swallow, leading to the accumulation of saliva that contains rabies virus, and with aggressive (rabid) behavior that facilitates its spread. It is possible, though I have no experimental proof, that when herpes simplex virus infects the sacral ganglia, it may (in)advertently stimulate nerve endings in the pelvic area , promoting sexual activity and increasing the likelihood it will move into another host.

Carl, thanks again for sending me a preview copy of your book. I look forward to many spirited discussions!

Best,

W. Ian Lipkin

Dear Ian:

Thanks for your reflections. There's a lot to ponder in them, but I'm most intrigued by your most speculative ideas—namely, whether viruses manipulate their hosts for their own benefit. As we discover more and more viruses, I suspect that scientists will indeed find good evidence that at least some viruses act like puppet masters.

I first became familiar with this sort of strategy while writing my previous book, Parasite Rex. Some of the most spectacular examples of parasite manipulation come from animal parasites. The lancet fluke—a parasitic flatworm—has a life cycle that takes it from snails to ants to grazing mammals like cows or sheep. Getting from one species to another is no simple feat. The lancet fluke has ways of manipulating one host after another to make its way through life. Mammals release the fluke eggs in their droppings, which are then eaten by snails. The snails defend themselves by coating the eggs in slime and then “coughing” them up. Ants passing by find the slime delicious, and devour it, along with the eggs inside.

Once inside the ant, the fluke eggs hatch, and the parasites develop. When they're ready for their next host, they begin to alter the ant's behavior. At twilight, the ant crawls up a blade of grass and clamps onto the tip. That's when grazing mammals are likely to pass by and devour the grass, and the ant, and the parasites inside. If the ant does not get eaten by dawn, the parasite causes it to release its grip and crawl down to the ground, where it can enjoy the shade until the end of the next day—when it feels the urge to climb again.

There are many such examples, and for some reason most of them come from parasitic animals—tapeworms, parasitoid wasps, thorny-headed worms, and the like. I don't think that this bias reflects the superior sophistication of parasitic animals over non-animal parasites like viruses. I think it's just another case of the drunk looking for his keys under a lamp post—not because the keys are there, but because that's where it's easier to look.

Consider, for example, the fungus Cordyceps. This little mushroom has no animal nervous system. It's just a mass of fungal cells. Yet Cordyceps manages to manipulate ants as well as lancet flukes. Ants pick up its spores on the ground, whereupon the fungus penetrates its host exoskeleton and starts to grow inside. It doesn't kill its host, however. Instead, it feeds on the ant's internal fluids until it's ready for its next stage of life. The ant then starts to climb—not to the tip of a blade of grass, but to the underside of a leaf a few feet off the ground. The ant clamps onto a vein in the leaf, whereupon the fungus sprouts a flower-like stalk out of its head, which showers spores on the ants below.

While Cordyceps may not have the complexity of the animal nervous system, however, it's not simple. Fungi have big genomes. Yeast, for example, has about 6,500 genes. There's a lot of storage capacity in such a genome to encode lots of sophisticated strategies. A parasitic fungus might be able to use some of its many genes to make proteins that interacted with its host's nervous system to direct it to just the right spot on a leaf. Viruses, on the other hand, typically only have a handful of genes.

Are ten genes enough for a virus to manipulate a host? I suspect they may well be. After all, scientists have already shown how viruses can manipulate us in other ways, such as the way that human papillomaviruses can speed up the growth and division of their host cells. There's nothing particularly special about behavior that would make it beyond the reach of viruses. They'd just need to make proteins that could shut down certain genes in neurons or switch other ones on to produce big changes. And as I mention in A Planet of Viruses, scientists are now finding giant viruses that contain over a thousand genes. Perhaps they have unappreciated powers of manipulation, too.

Parasitologists have one big piece of advice for anyone who wants to investigate whether viruses manipulate their hosts: don't be fooled by mirages. It is very tempting to see any change in a host as the product of a fine-tuned adaptation in its parasite. But it's also possible that a strange host behavior is merely a byproduct of being infected. It's not easy to distinguish between these alternatives. One way is to measure just how big of a difference these “manipulations” make to parasites. Robert Poulin of the University of Otago has studied a parasitic fluke that infects cockles on the beaches of New Zealand. It then needs to get into the shore birds that eat the cockles to move to the next stage of its life cycle. And it just so happens that the infected cockles lose the ability to burrow. So if you walk around on the beach in New Zealand, a lot of the cockles you see may be infected and unable to dig back down into the sand.

Seems like a great way for the parasite to boost its odds of getting into a bird, right? Well, Poulin worked through a detailed model of the parasite life cycle and discovered that it actually makes little difference. For one thing, the cockles also get eaten by other predators in which the parasite can't survive. So Poulin concludes that this case of “manipulation” could not have evolved because it benefited the parasites. Instead, it's just a side-effect. If someone wants to see if the aggression caused by rabies is a manipulation, they could try to carry out a similar test. It wouldn't be easy, but it would be interesting.

Still, it would be a mistake to look only for the most fine-tuned adaptations in viruses. Just consider a single-celled protozoan called Toxoplasma, which normally has a life cycle that takes it from cats to rats and other mammal prey and back to cats again. Toxoplasma does not make rats sick. Instead, it forms harmless cysts in rat brains. And there it seems to manipulate rats in a very precise way: it causes them to lose their fear of cat odor. This change may make them easier prey for cats, boosting the reproductive success of the parasite.

Toxoplasma is a serious health problem for humans. Pregnant women need to avoid contact with cat litter or garden soil, because they may pick up the parasite and accidentally ingest it. While healthy adults can keep Toxoplasma in check, fetuses with immature immune systems cannot. Toxoplasmosis can thus cause serious brain damage, as the parasite grows unchecked. Toxoplasmosis is also a serious concern for adults with compromised immune systems—due to AIDS or immune-suppressing drugs taken after organ transplants.

In human adults, the parasite may be benign, but it does appear to cause some shifts in personality. Some studies suggest that people with Toxoplasma are more likely to get into car accidents, for example. It would be a mistake to see these personality shifts as the parasite's strategy for getting us eaten by cats. For one thing, Toxoplasma was probably not a common disease in humans until the domestication of house cats—when we came into close contact with their parasite-laden droppings. For another, I doubt my pet cats would ever consider me a potential breakfast.

Still, the fact that these personality shifts are not fine-tuned adaptations does not make them unimportant. Could some psychological disorders, like depression, be the result of viruses that alter the behavior of their regular animal hosts? And as virologists like you discover new viruses moving into our species from other animal hosts, I wonder if they'll bring their puppetmaster tricks with them.

Best,
Carl

Stay tuned for next Friday's installment of TRAFFIC, featuring Zimmer in conversation with Richard Preston. And for more info on A Planet of Viruses, please visit the book's UCP page here.

March 21, 2011

The Cougar which isn't a Mellencamp

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The eastern mountain lion—called occasionally cougar, catamount, panther, painter, puma, or mountain screamer—was once one of the most widely distributed terrestrial mammals in the Western Hemisphere. But times have turned for these secretive and crepuscular big cats (the cougar is the largest of the small cats, actually, although it characteristically resembles those from the larger Pantherinae subfamily). In the twentieth century, following two centuries of European colonization, the mountain lion population on the Eastern seaboard was declared all but extinct. Dwellers in this coastal region questioned the existence of this majestic subspecies, giving rise to all sorts of legends—all of this despite the fact that it had been officially listed on the United States Fish and Wildlife Service endangered species list since 1973.

On March 2, 2011, the USFWS finally declared the eastern mountain lion (Felis concolor couguar) officially extinct.

"We recognize that many people have seen cougars in the wild within the historical range of the eastern cougar," said the Service's Northeast Region Chief of Endangered Species Martin Miller. "However, we believe those cougars are not the eastern cougar subspecies. We found no information to support the continued existence of the eastern cougar."

The Service's decision to formalize the extinction of the eastern cougar does not affect the status of yet another wild cat subspecies listed as endangered: the Florida panther. Once one of the most common predators of the Southeast, the Florida panther now exists in a breeding population of less than 200, which combs a habitat less than five percent of its original size and scale.

Maurice Hornocker, director of the non-profit Selway Institute, began his first long-term study of cougars in 1964. Since then, his groundbreaking research has led to more than 100 published papers on everything from the lynx and bobcat, to the ocelot, wolverine, and yes—even the Florida panther. Cougar: Ecology and Conservation is the capstone to Hornocker's pioneering career as a big cat researcher, and a powerful resource for scientists and conservationists alike. Edited in tandem with Sharon Negri, Cougar brings together twenty-two distinguished scientists, who together offer our fullest account yet of the cougar's behavior, genetics, ecology, and conservation needs, accompanied by stunning photographs of the creature in the wild and in captivity. From firsthand field research to ecosystem analyses, Cougar puts recent extinctions like that of the eastern mountain lion in perspective, and cautions new generations as to what delicate balances keep these enigmatic creatures from facing oblivion.

To learn more about cougar conservation, visit the Cougar Network or check out the Cougar Fact Center at the World Wildlife Fund. For additional information about Cougar: Ecology and Conservation, including reviews and awards, please visit the book's University of Chicago Press website, here.

Bruce Wright, New Brunswick wildlife biologist and author, with what is believed to be the last eastern puma. The puma was trapped by Rosarie Morin of St. Zacharie, Quebec in Somerset County, Maine in 1938. Mounted specimen resides in the New Brunswick Museum in St. John, New Brunswick (image and photo credit courtesy the USFWS).

Archived in Biology | Books for the News
Posted by KAM at 03:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 20, 2010

A reminder before you rake

As the autumn leaves begin to pile up in backyards everywhere, perhaps what all of us who groan at the hours of raking ahead could use is a reminder of the pleasures that those leaves brought us through the summer.

Fortunately, as Julia Keller of the Chicago Tribune pointed out on Sunday, we've got just that: The Book of Leaves: A Leaf-by-Leaf Guide to Six Hundred of the World's Great Trees.
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Keller, after admitting that she has "lost her head and is swooning" under the influence of The Book of Leaves, writes:

This big, beautiful, shiny, sumptuous and informational volume will enhance your appreciation of the natural world, but it does something else as well. It reminds you that wonderful things are often right under your nose. The most familiar entity—in this case, the leaves on the trees—often are the most enchanting, but we overlook them because they're so common. So ordinary.

The print edition of Sunday's Tribune shared some of the visual glories of the book with readers, but those of you reading the article on the Web need not be left behind: we've got a gallery of images from The Book of Leaves to entice you, too.

Check out the images, read Keller's article, then pick up a copy of the book and take her advice:

It needs to be spread out on a kitchen table, preferably with a couple of kids hovering nearby, so that you can all marvel at the colors and shapes that have been here all along, hidden in plain sight.

Archived in Biology
Posted by LTS at 03:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 01, 2010

Autumn Leaves

Image by Rebecca Anne @ Flickr

With expansive and more often than not treeless vistas many Midwesterners might not have the opportunity to experience the breathtaking transformations of the foliage in more arboreal climes. But luckily the city of Chicago can claim itself as an exception to the rule, especially here on the U of C campus whose streets are liberally flanked with elms, willows, and a variety of other species of deciduous trees. If you happen to live in such an area, you might find casual contemplation of their seasonal displays rewarding enough, but Allen J. Coombes' new book, The Book of Leaves: A Leaf-by-Leaf Guide to Six Hundred of the World's Great Trees, promises to deepen anyone's appreciation of the often stunning beauty trees and their humble vestment, the leaf, bestow upon our environment. Both visually stunning and scientifically engaging The Book of Leaves includes life-size, full-color images of each specimen in the book along with brief scientific and historical accounts of each tree, with fun-filled facts and anecdotes to broaden its portrait.

For more about the book see these sample pages (PDF format, 3.8Mb) or navigate to the book's page on the Press website.

Archived in Biology | Commentary | Reference and Writing
Posted by TXM at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 01, 2010

Nancy Drew needs you!

Last night my wife, as she often does, was reading an old Nancy Drew mystery, The Invisible Intruder (1969), when she started laughing. "Nancy's investigating the theft of a shell collection," she said, "and every single person she meets turns out to know a lot about shells!"

For example, Mr. Kittredge, a lawyer, on being shown a shell "the shape of a pyramid and … about five inches high" says,

"This is very interesting. Its nickname is the Fraud Shell. The right name is Epitonium scalare."

The lawyer explained that the shell was a rather rare type found in deep water off the coast of China.

Then there's a policeman, Detective Peron, who, on seeing Nancy inspecting a Crusader shell, says, "That's a beautiful specimen," and then, reminding us that we're in midcentury American suburbia, continues, "My wife has a set of those scalloped shells. She uses them to serve salads in and sometimes creamed dishes."

All of which is a roundabout way of getting to this question: Why haven't you bought a copy of our big, beautiful new Book of Shells yet?

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It's 600-plus oversized pages of life-sized photos of stunning shells, alongside information about their range, distribution, abundance, habitat, and distinct features. This slide show at the New York Times will give you an idea of the stunning shells profiled in the book.

After all, you never know when Nancy Drew might knock on your door, a pale-beige, spiral-shaped, fist-sized shell in hand, and ask you for help. Rather than stammering ineffectually like Ned Nickerson, wouldn't you want to be able to tell her, instantly, that it's a Euspira Lewisii, or Lewis's Moon, and that it is commonly found in middens left by Native Americans? Oh, and that its tissues can become toxic if it feeds on clams or oysters during a red tide?

Your local bookstore should have a copy of The Book of Shells waiting for you. Do it for Nancy.

Archived in Biology
Posted by LTS at 03:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 26, 2010

Chimpanzees Do Not Make Good Pets

Most pets in the US either bark or meow—Americans own more than seventy-seven million dogs and ninety-three million cats. But how many chimpanzees are kept at home as pets? It's a question that, until now, had no easy answer. But thanks to the pioneering work of Lincoln Park Zoo scientist Steve Ross, we now have a figure: about 113. And, if Ross, has his way, that number will dwindle to zero.

Today's Chicago Tribune reports on Ross's mission to change the way people view these primates and their (un)suitability as pets. His organization, Project ChimpCARE, hopes "to locate every chimpanzee in North America and assess its level of care."

For Ross, the ChimpCARE project is about protecting chimps and people from a dangerous public misperception that chimps are safe, people-friendly animals, which makes him opposed in particular to using chimps as actors. Chimps seen on screen are babies or prepubescent youngsters, never adults, Ross said. When they reach puberty, they become dangerously unpredictable and aggressive, a tendency that resulted in tragedy last year when one retired chimp attacked and severely injured a woman in Connecticut.

And Ross should know a thing of two about chimpanzees. After all, he coedited our new volume, The Mind of the Chimpanzee: Ecological and Experimental Perspectives, which brings together scores of prominent scientists from around the world to share the most recent research into what goes on inside the mind of our closest living relative.

Read more about former entertainment industry chimpanzees he's placed in facilities better suited to their needs and nature. And check out how you can help find chimpanzees better homes.

August 11, 2010

Whaddya mean ugly?

While academic studies on the nature of beauty abound, this article in the New York Times takes note of some recent efforts by academics to uncover the nature of ugly. The NYT's Natalie Angier writes:

Let's not pussyfoot. They are, by our standards, ugly animals—maybe cute ugly, more often just ugly ugly. And though the science of ugliness lags behind investigations into the evolution of beauty and the metrics of a supermodel's face, a few researchers are taking a crack at understanding why we find certain animals unsightly even when they don't threaten us with venom or compete for our food.

Citing researchers like neuroscientist Nancy Kanwishwer, and evolutionary biologist Geoffery Miller, Angier shows how most of our ideas about the aesthetic appeal of animals are based on how closely their physical appearance conforms to, or deviates from, the physical appearance of healthy, attractive, human beings—an idea which cultural critic Wendy Steiner (also quoted in the NYT article) both draws from and complicates with her account of changing perceptions of beauty in her books, Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art, and The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art, the latter of which will be published later this fall.

In Venus in Exile Steiner documents modernism's rejection of conventional, representational forms of beauty in favor of the "separate sphere" of the abstract and surreal, and in The Real Real Thing, the convergence of these worlds as new media blurs the line between the virtual and the real—a convergence which Steiner argues offers new ways of thinking about beauty. But will it open up new doors for the star-nosed mole? Angier writes:

Classical beauty is easy, but a taste for the difficult, the unconventional, the ugly, has often been seen as a mark of sophistication, a passport into the rarefied world of the artistic vanguard. "Beauty can be present by its violation," Dr. Steiner said, and the pinwheel appendages of the star-nosed mole are the rosy fingers of dawn.

Read the full article at the NYT website.

July 29, 2010

An evenhanded guide through our global energy landcape

With all the media attention to the environmental and human catastrophe, both actual and predicted, surrounding our dependence on oil and other non-renewable sources of energy, it can be easy to take a rather pessimistic view of our global energy landscape. As a recent story on NPR's Marketplace asks, will we ever be able to rid ourselves of our addiction to oil?

Perhaps not, at least in the near future, but in his new book The Powers That Be: Global Energy for the Twenty-first Century and Beyond, consulting geologist and independent scholar Scott L. Montgomery offers readers a rare glimmer of hope—arguing that quitting cold turkey isn't a necessary—or realistic—step towards securing our energy future anyway. What is crucial, Montgomery explains, is focusing on developing a more diverse, adaptable energy future, one that draws on a variety of sources—and is thus less vulnerable to disruption or failure.

An admirably evenhanded and always realistic guide, Montgomery enables readers to understand the implications of energy funding, research, and politics at a global scale. At the same time, he doesn't neglect the ultimate connection between those decisions and the average citizen flipping a light switch or sliding behind the wheel of a car, making The Powers That Be indispensible for our ever-more energy conscious age.

Read an excerpt.

July 26, 2010

Bigfoot on To the Best of Our Knowledge

Wisconsin Public Radio's To the Best of Our Knowledge aired a program last week on the theme of monsters, inviting several authors on the show whose books explore the important role they play in the Western imagination. Among them was Joshua Blu Buhs, author of Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend.

While Buhs doesn't believe in Bigfoot, as his book demonstrates, there's no denying Bigfoot mania. Tracing the wild and wooly story of America's favorite homegrown monster from the early nineteenth-century to the present, Buh's book offers more than a few interesting insights on what our fascination with this monster says about modern American culture.

You can catch the To the Best of Our Knowledge podcast on the WPR website or archived at this third party site. Also, find out more about Buhs' book on our website with this excerpt, and an interview with the author. Or stay right right here at the UCP blog to read our previous post featuring Buhs in dialogue with fellow UCP author Sigrid Schmalzer on Bigfoot and its Chinese analog, the yeren.

July 14, 2010

The Book of Shells in the NYT

It's summer time and for many that means hitting the beach for sand, sun, and, perhaps, some seashell collecting? If the latter happens to be on your list of activities this summer, it would definitely behoove you to pick up a copy of M. G. Harasewych and Fabio Moretzsohn's new book The Book of Shells: A Life-Size Guide to Identifying and Classifying Six Hundred Seashells. Filled with hundreds of amazing color images of seashells from around the world along with an explanation of the shell's range, distribution, abundance, habitat, and operculum—the piece that protects the mollusk when it's in the shell—The Book of Shells is an essential accompaniment to any shell scouting adventure. But even if a trip to the seashore isn't on the agenda, as this sampling of images from the book featured in a recent review for the New York Times demonstrates, The Book of Shells posses the uncanny power to transport you there anyway.

Also, check out these sample pages from the book (PDF format, 1.7Mb)

Happy shell hunting!

Archived in Biology | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 22, 2010

Seasick wins Grantham Prize

Congratulations to Alanna Mitchell, whose book Seasick: Ocean Change and the Extinction of Life on Earth won the 2010 Grantham Prize for Excellence in Environmental Reporting. Awarded by the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting, the prize honors outstanding coverage of the environment and recognizes reporting that has the potential to bring about constructive change. Seasick is first the book to be named a Grantham Prize winner. Mitchell will receive $75,000.

Seasick is an engaging work that clearly and eloquently explains the specific dangers facing global marine ecosystems," said Dr. Sunshine Menezes of the Metcalf Institute. "Reading Alanna Mitchell convinces you that the ocean is at least as important as the atmosphere when we worry about climate change," added Phillip Meyer, chairman of the Grantham Prize Jury. Editorial Director of the Sciences at the University of Chicago Press Christie Henry said, "Alanna Mitchell possesses exceptional empathy for and understanding of the natural world, inclusive of our role within in. We're thrilled that she's being recognized by this prestigious award. In the wake of the Gulf oil spill, the ocean and its health are at the forefront of everyone's minds. Seasick could not be more timely."

The first book to look at the planetary environmental crisis through the lens of the global ocean, Seasick takes the reader on an emotional journey through a hidden realm of the planet and urges conservation and reverence for the fount from which all life on earth sprang. With Mitchell at the helm, readers submerge 3,000 feet to gather sea sponges that may contribute to cancer care, see firsthand the lava lamp–like dead zone covering 17,000 square kilometers in the Gulf of Mexico, and witness the simultaneous spawning of corals under a full moon in Panama. Ultimately, Seasick dives beneath the surface of the world's oceans to give readers a sense of how this watery realm can be managed and preserved, and with it life on earth.

Learn more about Seasick, its author, and the Grantham Prize and read an excerpt from Mitchell's previous book, Dancing at the Dead Sea: Tracking the World's Environmental Hotspots

Archived in Awards | Biology | Books for the News
Posted by at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 15, 2010

Massimo Pigliucci goes to war against public ignorance

Massimo Pigliucci, author of Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk was recently invited to write for the Washington Post's Political Bookworm blog. The blog's regular author Steven Livingston introduces Pigliucci's article:

[In Nonsense on Stilts Pigliucci] analyzes how the belief in bunk science occurs, looking into how scientists work and spread their knowledge and how the culture absorbs it. Here, Pigliucci, a professor of philosophy at the City University of New York, turns his sights on a related issue: the way ideology worms its way into public education and elbows aside serious scholarship. His case in point: Texas.

Continue reading online at the Washington Post's Political Bookworm blog.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by TXM at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 11, 2010

Michael Forsberg on FORA.TV

Michael Forsberg whose stunning photographs of some of America's last untamed prairies grace the pages of his new book Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild recently delivered a fascinating lecture on his work and the importance of conservation efforts on the great plains at the California Academy of the Sciences. FORA.TV is currently hosting video of the entire lecture, which features images from Forsberg's book including some behind the scenes shots of the photographer in action, demonstrating the painstaking lengths to which the author went to photograph the lingering wild that still survives in America's heartland.

View the video below or watch it at FORA.TV.

Also, see a gallery of photographs and sample pages from the book in PDF format (4.2Mb).

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology
Posted by TXM at 01:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 29, 2010

On the Nature of Science and Psuedoscience

Climate change—and the debate about its causes or validity—is a subject of perpetual interest. Recently, we told you about the chasm between meteorologists—who predict short-term weather patterns and remain skeptical about long-term change—and climatologists—who, as the New York Times reported, "almost universally endorse the view that the earth is warming and that humans have contributed to climate change." (Stephen Colbert also recently covered in conflict with an amusing "Science Catfight" between Joe Bastardi, a weather forcaster, and Brenda Ekwurzel, of the Union of Concerned Scientists.)

Now the UK's Independent has offered an overview of books that "separate global warming fact from fiction." And Massimo Pigliucci's Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk get singled out as "entertaining and valuable guide to sorting the scientific grain from the chaff of pseudoscience."

He makes a distinction that clarifies some of our current problems. There are two kinds of bone fide science: one is law-based and experimental, cut-and-dried as a crystal chalice or a perfect intertwined double helix of DNA. Then there are historical sciences such as evolution or climate research that employ "the methods of a crime detective." .… As Pigliucci points out, what happened happened, and can be deduced by the trail it left; what might happen in the future involves contingency, freak occurrences that can tip the path of events onto a different course—"for want of a nail…". We can reconstruct the meteorite event of 65 million years ago but cannot predict the next such strike. We are left with a range of probabilities.

In the new book, Pigliucci explores the nature of science, the borderlands of fringe science, and—borrowing a famous phrase from philosopher Jeremy Bentham—the nonsense on stilts. Presenting case studies on a number of controversial topics, Pigliucci cuts through the ambiguity surrounding science to look more closely at how science is conducted, how it is disseminated, how it is interpreted, and what it means to our society. Although the Independent praised Pigliucci, not every one agrees. In The Chronicle Review, Carlin Romano offers a different—and less admirative—perspective on the book. But, given the contentious nature of the book, we expect a robust debate.

April 16, 2010

"The Terrorist Crop-Duster"

As Lynn C. Klotz and Edward J. Sylvester write in this recent article from the Huffington Post, in the wake of 9/11, and the subsequent lethal anthrax letters, the United States has spent billions of dollars on measures to defend the population against the threat of biological weapons. Over the last decade a significant proportion of taxpayer dollars have been funneled into clandestine biosecurity labs where thousands of scientists labor to identify possible terrorist threats, and produce countermeasures to protect a vulnerable population. But in their article as in their recent book, Breeding Bio Insecurity: How U.S. Biodefense Is Exporting Fear, Globalizing Risk, and Making Us All Less Secure, Klotz and Sylvester convincingly argue that all that money and effort hasn't actually made us any safer—in fact, it has made us more vulnerable.

In the article, the authors use a scenario put forward by the congressional Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism—a scenario in which a single crop duster with a payload of anthrax could potentially "kill more Americans than died in World War II"—to demonstrate how efforts to defend against such far-fetched imaginary threats can actually play a major role in creating the real ones. Read it online at the Huffington Post website.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 23, 2010

Climate change and human evolution

NPR's Morning Edition recently aired an interesting piece that investigates the next big trend amongst evolutionary scientists to explore how climate change has effected human evolution—a project recently endorsed by a panel of experts from National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.

In the piece reporter Christopher Joyce talks with several experts on the subject including Smithsonian Anthropologist Rick Potts, curator of a recent exhibit titled "What Does It Mean to Be Human?" The exhibit offers climate change as perhaps the most important factor influencing evolution, especially the evolution of the genus homo over the last 2.5 million years or so.

Anticipating this trend in the evolutionary sciences by nearly a decade, William H. Calvin's 2002 A Brain for All Seasons: Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change offers one of the most thorough explorations of the topic, taking readers around the globe and back in time to demonstrate how climatic cycles of cool, crash, and burn, provided the impetus for enormous increases in the intelligence and complexity of human beings. And with the recent warnings of more climatic catastrophe to come, Calvin's book not only offers a look at our evolutionary past, but perhaps at our future as well.

Navigate to the NPR website to listen to the show, or read an excerpt from A Brain for All Seasons.

Archived in Anthropology | Biology | Books for the News
Posted by TXM at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

March 15, 2010

On the Origins of Altruism

Sure, evolution explains how modern humans have come to look as we do, but can it explain how we act? What can Darwinian thought tell us about altruism and morality? This is the question posed this week by the Guardian as part of its fascinating "The Question" series.

Is [morality] merely a trick played on us by our genes? Or is that in turn an incoherent idea? Can science naturalise morality, and show that there are certain good ends which come naturally to the sort of animals we are? Where, in that case, is the belief that we are free too choose our own ends? Does an evolutionary account of human nature challenge liberalism as much as it challenges conservatism?

The first respondent is University of Chicago Press author Michael Ruse, a philosopher of biology, who writes that morality is a product of natural selection:

Morality then is not something handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai. It is something forged in the struggle for existence and reproduction, something fashioned by natural selection. It is as much a natural human adaptation as our ears or noses or teeth or penises or vaginas. It works and it has no meaning over and above this.

Ruse has long championed Darwinian theory (and challenged Christian doctrine). His 1979 book, The Darwinian Revolution, was the first comprehensive and readable synthesis of the history of evolutionary thought. Reissued in 1999, it still remains today one of the best primers on the subject.

More recently Ruse has collaborated with Devid Sepkowski to edit the The Paleobiological Revolution: Essays on the Growth of Modern Paleontology, a collection that traces the ascent of this once marginalized field to its current position as a first-rate discipline central to evolutionary studies.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News | Philosophy
Posted by at 01:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 04, 2010

Culture is Essential to Human Evolution

How has drinking milk changed the human genome? It used to be that humans switched off the gene that digests lactose shortly after being weaned from their mothers' milk, but Northern Europeans keep the gene switched on until adulthood. How did that happen? It's a direct effect of culture shaping evolution.

The theory that human culture can play an evolutionary role is relatively new; it used to be thought that human culture slowed or stopped evolution. Two of the earliest proponents of this new approach to genes and culture coevolution are Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, and they were the centerpiece of a recent New York Times article on the theory.

The idea that genes and culture co-evolve has been around for several decades but has started to win converts only recently. Two leading proponents, Robert Boyd of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Peter J. Richerson of the University of California, Davis, have argued for years that genes and culture were intertwined in shaping human evolution. "It wasn't like we were despised, just kind of ignored," Dr. Boyd said. But in the last few years, references by other scientists to their writings have "gone up hugely," he said.

And they've been working on this for quite a while. In 1985, the Press published Culture and the Evolutionary Process, which proposes that biological, psychological, sociological, and cultural factors change societies over time. More recently, the Press published their Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, which abandons the nature-versus-nurture debate as fundamentally misconceived and argues instead that our ecological dominance and our singular social systems stem from a psychology uniquely adapted to create complex culture. Their book has been praised widely, everywhere from the pages of scientific journals to the New York Review of Books, who called their argument "nuanced and sophisticated." After you read the Times article, be sure to take a look at the book excerpt.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News
Posted by at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 02, 2010

Ocean Change and the Extinction of Life on Earth

Good science doesn't always tell you what you want to hear. So while the message at the core of Alana Mitchell's Seasick: Ocean Change and the Extinction of Life on Earth, might be particularly hard to swallow, it is nevertheless a much needed medicine for our ailing oceans. As Rick MacPherson notes in a recent review of the book for the latest edition of the American Scientist:

In Seasick: Ocean Change and the Extinction of Life on Earth,… Mitchell trawls the oxygen-depleted oceanic dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, counts the days after the full moon in Panama to figure out when to search for signs of coral spawn, questions what a souring ocean chemistry holds for the future of marine plankton communities, and recounts the actions that have depleted global fisheries, documenting the toll that one frightening assault after another has taken on our ocean. Their cumulative effect has pushed us across a threshold. It appears that global systems may already be unable to return the ocean to its former state and are beginning instead to interact to create a new, far less hospitable state.

Find out more about the book on the University of Chicago Press website, or read the review at the American Scientist online.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News
Posted by TXM at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 23, 2010

Michael Forsberg multimedia in Nature Conservancy Magazine

Michael Forsberg, the man behind the lens in Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild has an article in the Spring 2010 edition of Nature Conservancy Magazine. Forsberg discusses his three year project to photograph the stark beauty of the remaining natural habitats in this once thriving ecosystem that stretches over one million square miles from southern Canada to northern Mexico, but which is now one of the most threatened environments in North America. Complete with a special Youtube video that matches some of the images from the book with Forsberg's commentary, the article drives home the urgent need for to protect the Great Plains and the surprising abundance of wildlife that rely on it. Read it online at the Nature Conservancy Magazine website.

Also see a gallery of photographs from the book and sample pages in PDF format (4.2Mb).

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology | Film and Media
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February 02, 2010

Speaking the truth and exposing the bunk

Here's a link to one of the more interesting blogs we've stumbled across lately. Rationally Speaking, a blog managed by Massimo Pigliucci, CUNY philosopher and author of Making Sense of Evolution: The Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Biology, as well as the forthcoming Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk, is a spin off Pigliucci's work on the philosophy of science with a focus on debunking virtually everything from Google, to the idea of American democracy itself. Recently, they've started up a new podcast, with the inaugural episode titled "Can history be a science?" and a special Valentines' day episode on the science and philosophy of love right around the corner. Listen and read at http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/.

January 29, 2010

The modern afterlives of the bodies in the bog

According to Wikipedia, recorded discoveries of bog bodies—human bodies which have been found remarkably preserved by the unique conditions of the sphagnum bogs in which they are found—go back as far as the 18th century. The mystery surrounding the significance of these bodies and the nature of their demise has for centuries provoked a macabre fascination in the public mind, but until the mid-twentieth century, no one even knew how long the bodies had lain in their muddy graves. As Philip Hoare notes in a recent book review in the Telegraph, it was not until Danish archaeologist PV Glob's 1969 book The Bog People, that many of these bodies were revealed to be human sacrifices dating back to the early iron age. As Hoare writes "sentenced to death for worldly crimes but slain to propitiate the terrible deities, they were strangled with leather nooses or were pinned face down with wooden struts to drown in the mud."

Hoare continues:

As a young girl in Copenhagen, Karin Sanders, [author of the new book on the subject Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination], was also a fan of Glob's book. But hers is a decidedly post-modern account, one which seeks to show how the bog bodies took their place in our culture, out of theirs, 'estranged from us even as they mirror us'. She deftly teases out the paradoxes: born of neither land nor water but something in between, the bodies are an uncanny link between the pagan beliefs that prompted their deaths and our own supposedly rational world.

Demonstrating the profound impact these discoveries have made on modern western society, Sanders shows how these eerily preserved remains came alive in art and science as material metaphors for such concepts as trauma, nostalgia, and identity. Sigmund Freud, Joseph Beuys, Serge Vandercam, Seamus Heaney, and other major figures have used them to reconsider fundamental philosophical, literary, aesthetic, and scientific concerns. Sanders contends that the power of bog bodies to provoke such a wide range of responses is rooted in their unique status as both archeological artifacts and human beings. They emerge as corporeal time capsules that transcend archaeology to challenge our assumptions about what we can know about the past.

To find out more read the complete review in the Telegraph.

January 12, 2010

Deciphering the secret languages of the jungle

The science section of today's New York Times is running an article about animal communication—more specifically, communication among some of our closest primate ancestors like chimpanzees, baboons, and monkeys—that sheds light on some of the recent research scientists have been conducting to decipher the meaning behind their grunts and yells.

In the hopes that this research will one day yield some insight into how the human faculty for language has evolved, as the article notes, scientists like Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth have dedicated their lives to studying primate societies in the field to help piece together a clearer evolutionary road map between monkeys, and us.

The NYT's Nicholas Wade cites the scientists' research published in several of their books, including their fascinating study of vervet monkeys in How Monkeys See the World: Inside the Mind of Another Species, and their more recent Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind, to demonstrate how their work has helped to reveal some primate species to possess a number of the essential faculties that also underlie human language.

"Yet," as Wade writes, "monkeys have been around for 30 million years without saying a single sentence. What is it that has kept all other primates locked in the prison of their own thoughts?"

In the article Cheney and Seyfarth, along with several other leading scientists in the field, offer some diverse hypotheses, but in the end it seems they all agree that the once blurry line between humans and our primate ancestors seems now to be coming into clearer focus.

Check out the science section of the NYT to read the article or read this excerpt from Baboon Metaphysics.

Archived in Anthropology | Biology | Books for the News
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January 05, 2010

Conservationists spotlight the cougar

An article in today's New York Times spotlights one of North America's most endangered large cats: the Florida panther. Despite lending its name to the local hockey team and its status as the state animal since 1982, Florida panthers (actually a subspecies of the North American cougar) have been on the brink of extinction for generations, mostly due to the depletion of their habitable range by agriculture and development.

Yet, as the NYT's Natalie Angier points out, these cats enjoy a certain amount of popularity in the south, perhaps because one of the biggest hurdles to gaining public support for conservation efforts in other parts of the country isn't a factor. As Angier writes "in contrast with mountain lions in California and other Western states, which have been known to ambush, kill and partly consume the occasional jogger or hiker, there are no recorded cases of a Florida panther's attacking a human being." Nevertheless, she writes, a rebound in development across the state could mean "it is only a matter of time and sustained human encroachment before a Florida panther pounces on a Florida land speculator." (On the other hand, perhaps this is one of the best arguments from an economic standpoint for preserving the species.)

Thus finding a path to a peaceful coexistence between humans and cougars is paramount in many conservationist's minds as we come to understand the role big cats play in the ecosystem. And perhaps no researcher has contributed more to this understanding than Maurice Hornocker who conducted the first long-term study of cougars in the Idaho wilderness in 1964 and is co-editor with Sharon Negri of a new book on the subject, Cougar: Ecology and Conservation. The capstone to Hornocker's long career studying big cats, Cougar is a powerful and practical resource for scientists, conservationists, and anyone with an interest in large carnivores. He and conservationist Sharon Negri bring together the diverse perspectives of twenty-two distinguished scientists to provide the fullest account of the cougar's ecology, behavior, and genetics, its role as a top predator, and its conservation needs. This compilation of recent findings, stunning photographs, and firsthand accounts of field research unravels the mysteries of this magnificent animal and emphasizes its importance in healthy ecosystem processes and in our lives.

For more about these fascinating creatures and their struggle for survival check out Natalie Angier's article in the New York Times or navigate to the press's website for more about the book.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News
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December 03, 2009

Get Headless Males Make Great Lovers for free

For December's free e-book of the month we are pleased to offer Marty Crump's fascinating collection of essays on curious creatures and their amazing behaviors in Headless Males Make Great Lovers: And Other Unusual Natural Histories.

In five thematic chapters, Marty Crump—a tropical field biologist well known for her work with the reproductive behavior of amphibians—examines the bizarre conduct of animals as they mate, parent, feed, defend themselves, and communicate. Crump's enthusiasm for the unusual behaviors she describes—from sex change and free love in sponges to aphrodisiac concoctions in bats—is visible on every page, thanks to her skilled storytelling, which makes even sea slugs, dung beetles, ticks, and tapeworms fascinating and appealing. Steeped in biology, Headless Males Make Great Lovers points out that diverse and unrelated animals often share seemingly bizarre behaviors—evidence, Crump argues, that these natural histories, though outwardly weird, are successful ways of living.

Also check out Crump's follow up to Headless Males, Sexy Orchids Make Lousy Lovers: & Other Unusual Relationships or her account of her quest through the Costa Rican rain forests to collect data on the now extinct Golden Frog in her previous work from the press, In Search of the Golden Frog, both currently available at a 20% discount. Or for all our currently available e-books, see our list of e-books by subject.

E-books from the University of Chicago Press are offered in Adobe Digital Editions format for Mac, PC, and a number of mobile devices such as the Sony Reader, IREX, BeBook, and more. Check out these links to find out more about Adobe Digital Editions or more about e-books from the University of Chicago Press.

Archived in Biology | Commentary
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November 18, 2009

A history of preservation

While we might take for granted the notion that animal species can become extinct—and that, occasionally, humans are the direct cause—among the early pioneers of natural science, the idea that any link in the great chain of being could be broken took a while to sink in. As the Washington Times' Claire Hopley notes in a recent review of Mark V. Barrow Jr.'s Nature's Ghosts: Confronting Extinction From the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology:

18th- and early-19th-century scientists and thinkers believed that the world was created with a complete inventory of humans, animals, birds and vegetation, forming a chain of being.
The idea that a link in this chain could disappear undermined this fundamental concept. As Jefferson wrote, "Such is the economy of nature, that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken." He put the mammoth first in his list of American mammals because he expected that a living example would be discovered as explorers moved westward and encountered wildlife unknown in the east.

The existence of uncharted territories, not only in America but also in Africa and the South Pacific, fostered resistance to the idea of extinction. But as distant countries were explored it became clear that species were being wiped out.…

But as Barrow's new book demonstrates, as the idea of extinction gained credence so too did the idea of conservation, at first, among natural scientists who wished to preserve specimens for study, and later, among members of the public interested in preserving the beauty of the North American wildlife.

Delivering a sweeping, beautifully illustrated historical narrative of these efforts to preserve the natural world, Barrow's Nature's Ghosts takes readers on a journey from the early scientific discoveries that revealed the threat of extinction, to the pioneering conservation efforts of early naturalists like John James Audubon and John Muir.

With Nature's Ghosts Barrow offers an unprecedented view of what we've lost—and a stark reminder of the hard work of preservation still ahead.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 16, 2009

The birth of environmentalism in the Lake District

Seemingly but one of the many placid bodies of water carved out of the glaciated rock that inhabits the heart of England's Lake District, the man-made Thirlmere—which since the late nineteenth century has been supplying water to the city of Manchester more than 160 km away—was once the focus of one of the first conflicts pitting industrial progress against a burgeoning conservation movement. In her new book, The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism, Harriet Ritvo offers the fascinating tale of Thirlmere's construction and the struggles to stop it, all while delivering an insightful analysis of how this conflict can inform modern environmental and conservation campaigns.

In a recent review of the book for The Independent, Emma Townshend writes:

Ritvo's account of this confrontation between industrial commerce and early environmentalism is clear and utterly readable. Thirlmere was the first modern conflict between these two camps, so difficult to reconcile. Ideas about natural beauty versus the need for modern utilities were discussed here in detail for the first time. But the consequent history of big-dam making has proved equally controversial—such as at Hetch Hetchy in the US, a parallel turn of the century project to bring water supplies to San Francisco by creating a dam in the centre of the new Yosemite National Park.
In our own decade, the Three Gorges project on the Yangtze took its place in the history books as the most destructive dam ever built in archaeological, cultural and human terms, having displaced some 1.24 million people from their homes and contributed to the extinction of the Yangtze River dolphin. Yet the project is also hailed in China for its formidable contribution to cutting greenhouse-gas emissions: in its first three years the dam has already generated enough electricity to cover a third of its building costs, and it provides significant winter flood protection to the provinces downstream, including several of China's biggest cities.

There are no easy answers, and the dam at Three Gorges demonstrates exactly why Ritvo's fascination with the conflict at Thirlmere remains relevant to us today.

For Townshend's complete article navigate to The Independent website.

Archived in Biology | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 12, 2009

Up-close and personal with a bobcat

Ever wondered about the techniques the pros use to produce such seemingly impossible images as the one above?
In a recent article for the Omaha World-Herald staff writer Rick Ruggles offers some insights into those used by Michael Forsberg, author of the new book Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild—a fascinating photographic journey through some of the last remaining natural landscapes of the Great Plains.

In his new book, Forsberg—whose work has also appeared in such publications as Audubon, National Geographic, Natural History, and National Wildlife—has captured a number of amazing images of natural landscapes and wildlife. But as the World-Herald article reveals, the intimacy with which Forsberg is able to approach his subject matter is, perhaps ironically, due to the fact that much of the time, he's not even there when the shutter opens. As Ruggles writes:

Wildlife photographers like Michael Forsberg, who just published the book Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild, now have the ability to capture close-ups of wary creatures that can hear or sniff out a person from hundreds of yards away.
Forsberg intended to deploy that strategy this bright-blue October day just west of the headquarters of the National Audubon Society's Rowe Sanctuary. The sanctuary is known as one of the finest spots from which to view the sandhill crane migration in March.

Forsberg, 43, looked for a place to assemble a "camera trap," which includes two small devices with an infrared beam running from one, the transmitter, to the other, the receiver. The photographer also sets out a camera and lights, or flashes.

A predator that steps through the invisible red beam triggers the camera, which in turn triggers the flashes. Forsberg can be far away, eating dinner with his wife and two daughters in Lincoln or photographing swans in the Sand Hills, when the image he covets is captured.

Continue reading about Forsberg's photographic techniques at the Omaha World-Herald or to preview some of its results, check out our online gallery of images from the book, and these sample pages in PDF format.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biology | Reviews
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November 02, 2009

Press Release: Klotz and Sylvester, Breeding Bio Insecurity

In the tense months that followed the 9/11 attacks, the public’s fears of further terrorism were fanned by the deadly anthrax letters, which seemed to symbolize the ease with which terrorists could kill using biological weapons. But in the subsequent years the United States government has spent billions of dollars on combating bioweapons—so citizens can rest easy, knowing we’re much safer. Or are we?

Far from it, say Lynn Klotz and Edward Sylvester, and with Breeding Bio Insecurity they make a forceful case that not only has all of that money and research not made us safer, it’s made us far more vulnerable. Laying out their case clearly and carefully, they show how the veil of secrecy in which biosecurity researchers have been forced to work—in hundreds of locations across the country, unable to properly share research or compare findings—has caused no end of delays and waste, while vastly multiplying the odds of theft, sabotage, or lethal accident. Meanwhile, our refusal to make this work public causes our allies and enemies alike to regard U.S. biodefense with suspicion. True biosecurity, Klotz and Sylvester explain, will require that the federal government replace fearmongering with a true analysis of risk, while openly involving the public and the scientific community in a joint effort to reduce the threat of bioterror.

Read the press release.

October 21, 2009

The Great Plains you've never seen

An article in today's Omaha World-Herald begins by quoting photographer and author Michael Forsberg as he describes one one his initial experiences with the midwestern landscapes that inspired his newest book, Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild. The World-Herald's David Hendee writes:

Laid out prone in South Dakota's Badlands, wildlife photographer Michael Forsberg focused on burrowing owls in the prairie dog town far down the prairie.
During weeks spent hunkered in Dakota dirt, Forberg's aim shifted.

"I was amazed day after day at all the wildlife I saw," he said. "Not just the amount, but the diversity. Everything from dragon flies to pronghorn and a bunch in between. But I knew that people in cars screaming by off in the distance were looking over this landscape and thinking there wasn't anything there."

Forsberg set out to challenge the notion that the Great Plains is a place to drive through or fly over by revealing the region in ways rarely seen or thought about.

And with Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild Forsberg has accomplished just that. Revealing a midwestern landscape alien even to many of those who live in its midst, Forsberg's book demonstrates the surprisingly diverse natural communities that still exist on the Great Plains, despite their increasingly endangered status through several centuries of westward expansion and the rise of large scale industrial agricultural practices. Practices which continues to threaten some of the last strongholds of virgin prairie left in the U.S.

More than just pretty pictures, in his new book Forsberg has enlisted the help of former poet laureate Ted Kooser, writer-rancher Dan O'Brien, and geographer David Wishart to provide a foreword and essays complementing his stunning images of some of the last key habitats holding the plains ecosystem, and its arability, together. (For an interesting historical look at the consequences of human mismanagement of the Great Plains see Dorothea Lange's photographs of some of the first Dust Bowl migrants in Anne Whiston Spirn's recent book Daring to Look.) As Hendee writes:

Great Plains rivers have run dry. Aquifers have been mined. Wildlife populations have disappeared. Top soil has blown away. And native grassland continues to be turned under by plows.
"This is a working (farming) landscape and always will be," Forsberg said. "But we have choices to make about whether we want wildlife to have a seat at the table. If we don't value this natural heritage—and there will continue to be change if we don't value it—we could lose it altogether."

Read the full article on the Omaha World-Herald website. Also see a gallery of photographs and sample pages in PDF format (4.2Mb).

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biology | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Press Release: Ritvo, The Dawn of Green

Green jobs. Green technology. Green agriculture. Green energy. In the twenty-first century, green—and the environmental consciousness that’s associated with it—is good. But where did the green revolution, and the modern environmental movement, get started? Historian Harriet Ritvo has traced it origins to an unlikely place—a bucolic reservoir in the English Lake District. To look at it today, with its placid sheen, surrounding evergreens, and apparent lack of pollution or development, Thirlmere hardly looks like the site of a revolution. But under its calm surface lurks the enduring legacy of a nineteenth-century conflict that pitted industrial progress against natural conservation—and helped launch the environmental movement as we know it.

Purchased by the city of Manchester in the 1870s, Thirlmere was dammed and converted into a reservoir, its water piped a hundred miles south to the burgeoning industrial city and its workforce. This feat of civil engineering—and of natural resource diversion—inspired one of the first environmental struggles of modern times. The Dawn of Green re-creates the battle for Thirlmere and the clashes between conservationists who wished to preserve the lake and developers eager to supply the needs of industry and a growing urban population. Bringing to vivid life the colorful and strong-minded characters who populated both sides of the debate, Ritvo shows how lessons learned in the Lake District can inform and guide modern environmental and conservation campaigns.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 16, 2009

Press Release: Mitchell, Seasick

In September, President Obama’s Ocean Policy Task Force released its first report, recommending the creation of a new National Ocean Council to coordinate federal response to ocean pollution, rising sea levels, and ocean acidification, among other problems. With the creation of the NOC, the new administration is signaling that healthy oceans matter. But the task before the council is enormous, given that the sea is, well, sick.

Veteran science journalist Alanna Mitchell reveals just how dire the situation is in Seasick. Here, she dives beneath the surface of the world’s oceans to give readers a sense of how this watery realm has been defiled—and what can be done to manage and preserve it, and with it life on earth. With Mitchell at the helm, readers submerge 3,000 feet to gather sea sponges that may contribute to cancer care, see firsthand the lava lamp—like dead zone covering 17,000 square kilometers in the Gulf of Mexico, and witness the simultaneous spawning of corals under a full moon in Panama.

The first book to look at the planetary environmental crisis through the lens of the global ocean, Seasick takes the reader on an emotional journey through a hidden area of the planet and urges conservation and reverence for the fount from which all life on earth sprang.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Press Releases
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October 08, 2009

A giant moose goes to Paris

In the wake of the American revolution, world-renowned French naturalist Count Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle opined that the flora and fauna of the New World (humans included) were inferior to European specimens. Buffon's theory of American "degeneracy" began a French and American culture war, as prominent Americans, among them Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, fought to refute the European claims.

As a recent review in Natural History magazine notes, Lee Allen Dugatkin's Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America, vividly recreates these debates, including the amazing story—referenced in the book's title—of Jefferson's shipment of a full-grown moose carcass to Buffon, in the hopes of definitively proving that North American fauna were every bit the equal of Europe's. Laurence A. Marschall writes for Natural History:

He succeeded, with the help of correspondents in New England, who arranged to kill a moose in Vermont, cart it to the coast, and ship its skeleton and skin to Paris, where it arrived around October 1, 1787. Unfortunately, Buffon died within little more than a year of the moose, writing nothing more on the subject, so we will never know if he was convinced of the error of his ways.

Still, though the giant moose may not have made much of an impact on Buffon's Histoire, thanks to Dugatkin's fascinating, not to mention entertaining, chronicle of these debates, we can rest assured that it has found its rightful place in ours.

For more, read Marschall's review in the current issue of Natural History magazine.

October 07, 2009

Preserving the last wild habitats of the Great Plains

Driving through the Midwest without falling asleep at the wheel can be a test despite the ubiquitous presence of Starbucks at nearly every overpass from Nebraska to Chicago. Not that it wouldn't be rather, well, "plane" otherwise, but American industrial agriculture definitely has transformed much of the landscape of the North American interior into a monotonous, homogeneous grid. And the adverse impacts of these short-sighted agricultural practices go far beyond aesthetics, threatening public health, as well as the profitability of other industries that rely on the fragile ecosystems of the American heartland—ecosystems that have, over the last century, been all but obliterated. All the more reason why we should celebrate the hard work of folks like Michael Forsberg whose stunning photographic journey through some of the last remaining wild habitats in the Midwest has just hit the bookstore shelves in Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild.

In a recent article for the Nebraska based publication Prairie Fire, Forsberg himself details some of the trials and tribulations he endured to capture the rare images included in his new book, as well as some of the reasons he has for enduring. Toward the end of his piece Forsberg writes:

Will we as a culture also decide to find equal value and virtue in protecting and restoring our Plains' rich natural heritage, its amazing natural diversity and all the ecosystem services that its nature provides? In the long view, can the Great Plains function as working wilderness?
The contents of this book, and its … photographs, are not sufficient enough to answer these questions, but perhaps it is a sufficient start to a conversation. Time is short. Let's not waste it.

Read the rest on the Prairie Fire website and check out this recent review of the book in Lincoln's Journal Star.

Also see a gallery of photographs and sample pages in PDF format (4.2Mb).

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology
Posted by TXM at 07:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 06, 2009

Press Release: Forsberg, Great Plains

Spanning the area west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains, the Great Plains once ranked among the most magnificent grasslands on the planet, second only to the Serengeti in sheer size, grandeur, and biodiversity. But today this broad expanse of prairie and steppe is among the most endangered ecosystems in the entire world. Here award-winning photographer Michael Forsberg—a frequent contributor to such publications as National Geographic, Audubon, National Wildlife, and Natural History—reveals the lingering wild that still survives on the Plains and whose diverse natural communities, landscapes, and native flora and fauna together create one extraordinary whole. Featuring contributions from novelist and wildlife biologist Dan O’Brien, noted geographer and environmentalist David Wishart, and American poet laureate Ted Kooser, Great Plains features 150 stunning full-color images along with literary, historical, and scientific passages that bring this extraordinary part of the country into more vivid focus than ever before.

Most Americans know little about the landscape, wildlife, and history of this vast part of our country. But here, the beauty and majesty of the Great Plains come alive in all their quiet glory.

Read the press release. Also see a gallery of photographs from the book, or these sample pages in PDF format.

October 02, 2009

Press Release: Walls, Passage to Cosmos

This month marks the 240th anniversary of the birth of Alexander von Humboldt. Although today he is less well known than some of the luminaries he inspired, Humboldt was the most famous intellectual of the age that began with Napoleon and ended with Darwin.

With The Passage to Cosmos, Humboldt remerges for a new age. Here, Laura Dassow Wall traces Humboldt’s ideas for Cosmos, the book that crowned his career, to his 1799 journey to the Americas, where he first experienced the diversity of nature and of the world’s peoples—and envisioned a new cosmopolitanism that would link ideas, disciplines, and nations into a global web of knowledge and cultures. In reclaiming Humboldt’s transcultural and transdisciplinary project, Walls situates America in a lively and contested field of ideas, actions, and interests, and reaches beyond to a new worldview that integrates the natural and social sciences, the arts, and the humanities.

To the end of his life, Humboldt called himself “half an American,” but ironically his legacy has largely faded in the United States. The Passage to Cosmos will reintroduce this seminal thinker to a new audience and return America to its rightful place in the story of his life, work, and enduring legacy.

Read the press release. Also read an excerpt.

Archived in Biology | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 16, 2009

Debating end-of-life issues

Thanks to a certain former governor from Alaska, "death panels" (and the attendant fear that the Obama administration will somehow decide when and how Americans die) have gained increasing currency in the health-care reform debate. Despite repeated assurances from the administration that the bill calls for no such thing (and evidence from fact-checking organizations that dispute Palin's claim), a new poll shows that 41% of Americans believe that "senior citizens or seriously-ill patients would die because government panels would prevent them from getting the medical treatment they needed."

This week, Newsweek magazine devoted its cover to an article (not-so-subtly) titled "The Case for Killing Granny." The piece argues that "the need to spend less money on the elderly at the end of life is the elephant in the room in the health-reform debate" and that in order to rein in health care costs, we, as a nation, despite how uneasy it makes us, are going to need to confront this reality. As the article suggests, "Americans are afraid not just of dying, but of talking and thinking about death. Until Americans learn to contemplate death as more than a scientific challenge to be overcome, our health-care system will remain unfixable." With end-of-life issues at center stage in the health-care reform debate, it's an apt time to look closely at modern death, especially in American hospitals. Medical anthropologist Sharon R. Kaufman does just that in the award-winning And a Time to Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life.

Over the past thirty years, the way Americans experience death has been dramatically altered. The advent of medical technology capable of sustaining life without restoring health has changed where, when, and how we die. In this revelatory study, medical anthropologist Sharon R. Kaufman examines the powerful center of those changes: the hospital, where most Americans die today. She deftly links the experiences of patients and families, the work of hospital staff, and the ramifications of institutional bureaucracy to show the invisible power of the hospital system in shaping death and our individual experience of it. In doing so, Kaufman also speaks to the ways we understand what it means to be human and to be alive.

As Newsweek notes, "studies show that about 70 percent of people want to die at home—but that about half die in hospitals." Hospitals will continue to be central to the American way of death, and how we die, and who decides when, will be forever linked to the health-care reform debate of 2009, no matter what gets passed into law. Kaufman's book, which you can read an excerpt of here, shines light on the ethical quandaries at the heart of the issue.

September 11, 2009

The debate over the return of the wolf

The New York Times website is running an article and multimedia feature about the first legal wolf hunt in the lower forty-eight states in the last 35 years. Having made an extraordinary comeback in many states, the American gray wolf was recently removed from the list of endangered species by U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar. And in states like Idaho, some claim that the wolf has not only made a comeback, but that its growing populations are now large enough to threaten the lives and livelihoods of ranchers and other rural dwellers. Sportsmen eager to track down these "world class predators" are busy preparing for a unique opportunity in the hunting world while environmental groups like Defenders of Wildlife say that the delisting of wolves will only return the species to near extinction status and destroy an essential part of many ecosystems throughout North America. With both groups claiming that the science supports their point of view, the question of managing wolf populations is a contentious one.

But for the rest of us, L. David Mech and Luigi Boitani's Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation, offers the most systematic, comprehensive overview of wolf biology since 1970. In Wolves, many of the world's leading wolf experts provide state-of-the-art coverage of just about everything you could want to know about these fascinating creatures. Individual chapters cover wolf social ecology, behavior, communication, feeding habits and hunting techniques, population dynamics, physiology and pathology, molecular genetics, evolution and taxonomy, interactions with nonhuman animals such as bears and coyotes, reintroduction, interactions with humans, and conservation and recovery efforts.

Unrivalled in scope and comprehensiveness, Wolves is the definitive resource on these extraordinary animals for scientists and amateurs alike.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News
Posted by TXM at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 17, 2009

"A time machine tour of our continent's abundant past"

For some time now the movement to preserve natural habitats has gained in popularity as we begin to understand our species' limited capacity to thrive in isolation from the untold number of other organisms that make up the ecosystems in which we live. And with the clear and present danger posed by mass-extinctions, climate change, and the rapid depletion of natural resources, many long for a return to the abundance that the wilds of North America once offered. But while it is impossible to turn back the hands of time, with Steve Nicholls' recent book, Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery we can at least gain a clearer picture of what it was like, and perhaps the inspiration to repair the damage. As Marion Elizabeth Rodgers writes a recent review of the book for the Washington Times:

Paradise Found is one of the best books I have read in years. The book guides us easily through the North Atlantic, the East Coast, subtropical Caribbean, the West Coast, Baja California and the Great Plains, seamlessly blending firsthand accounts from historical journals, personal anecdotes and the latest scientific inquiry. Wildlife filmmaker and entomologist Steve Nicholls paints a picture of 500 years of people and nature, giving us a time machine tour of our continent's abundant past.
And what an abundance there was! Meadows full of ducks, forests filled with all kinds of berries and nuts—oaks, pecans and most plentiful of all, the American chestnut. Those forests were not the same as we know today. These were natural cathedrals, with green roofs arching 50 feet above one's head; giant trunks measured more than 20 feet in circumference. So many strawberries littered the ground that one naturalist noted his horse's hooves were being stained red with their juice. At the mouth of a river was an island filled with so many egrets that it looked as if it were blanketed with snow.…

Digging into the journals and diaries of explorers and settlers, [Nicholls] became convinced if more people knew the true vitality of nature, they would not only be awed, but be reminded of the sheer scale of our impact on the planet—and be spurred to repair the damage. Environmental awareness is not new, but as Mr. Nicholls states, "our mentality has been to preserve and isolate sections of nature, in national parks or wilderness areas, separate from the human world."

We city folk have grown so apart from nature that I wonder how many comprehend how much has been lost from our own backyards. Here in Georgetown, the cocoon where I live, neighbors shop at eco-friendly Whole Foods, yet, in apparent disconnect, chop down century-old trees and spray pesticides on their properties, replacing soil with cement and trees with clumps of liriope. Is it any wonder that the amount and variety of songbirds have steadily diminished, while the pesky mosquito remains?

This detached attitude is, in no small way, responsible for the scale of effects Mr. Nicholls outlines in his book. "The bottom line is that we are just one part of nature," he writes, and the sooner we become enlightened with that humbling realization, the sooner we can bring about a balance to our immediate environment and beyond.

Read the rest of the review on the Washington Times website. Also read an excerpt from the book.

June 10, 2009

Back and forth on Bigfoot

Brian Switek's Laelaps blog ran an appreciative review of Joshua Blu Buhs' Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend last Monday, noting the book's cultural analysis that seeks to understand the how and why the beast has sparked such unflagging interest amongst the American public.

As Buhs explains, the most devoted of the Sasquatch devotees appear to have been "white working class males." According to Buhs, during the social upheaval of the sixties and seventies, these men gravitated towards the myth in response the perceived threats of consumerism, civil rites, and feminization." For them, writes Switek, "Bigfoot often represented the elusive vestige of 'true' masculinity that could only be found in the wild."

But as time went on the myth of Bigfoot—once a symbol of resistance towards the establishment—was appropriated by mainstream consumer culture and employed, as Switek writes, as "a desexualized symbol used to purvey goods from beer to beef jerky." And with that one might think the story of Bigfoot mania would have come to an end. Yet, two men in rural Georgia announced last summer that they had killed Bigfoot and drew instant, feverish attention leading to more than 1,000 news stories worldwide. And for further evidence that the myth is still a hot topic in some circles, check out the lively discussion on Switek's blog (including several posts by Buhs). Here's an excerpt from a true believer:

Although I'm not going to be suckered into buying and reading a book that is so completely misleading, I think it is time to recommend that Joshua [do] better "research" before he makes such unfounded, speculative conclusions. Like others writers who clearly approached this topic with a rather shallow conclusion in mind, anyone who thinks this subject is perpetuated by social needs, rather than persistent direct sightings and encounters with these animals, is a fool.

To which Buhs eventually replies:

My book is not about eyewitnesses, the evidence for Bigfoot, or the evidence against Bigfoot. I state my skepticism about Bigfoot's existence at the beginning of the book because that seemed like good form.
But the question I ask is, Why all the fuss?…

There are many legendary creatures which don't get nearly as much attention—sea serpents, for example, haven't captured the American public's attention. There are plenty of reports of them in Lake Champlain, Ogopogo, and elsewhere. They are inherently interesting—gigantic creatures living in our midst—and yet they haven't generated a lot of buzz since the late nineteenth century.

See the Laelaps blog.

To find out more about the book see an excerpt and an interview with the author.

Archived in Biology | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 03:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Happy (Belated) World Oceans Day!

Monday, June 8, was the inaugural observance of the United Nations' World Oceans Day. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said about the celebration, "The first observance of World Oceans Day allows us to highlight the many ways in which oceans contribute to society. It is also an opportunity to recognize the considerable challenges we face in maintaining their capacity to regulate the global climate, supply essential ecosystem services and provide sustainable livelihoods and safe recreation."

It's hard to believe, but for thousands of years, the world's oceans were considered unimportant—at most a means of global travel and a source of food, at least a dumping ground for trash. We now know that the ecosystem that makes up 99 percent of living space on Earth is our life-support system, regulating the planet’s temperatures, climate, and key chemical cycles. With this global commemoration of our planet's most fragile ecosystem, the world oceans are at last getting the attention they need and deserve.

The University of Chicago Press has long recognized the important role our oceans play in our planet's health. In honor of World Oceans Day, we present this maritime reading list.

Four billion years old, the oceans formed as the Earth's scorching surface cooled, the primordial atmosphere condensed, and torrential rains fell. Their color is the unique signature of our blue planet, their composition a chemical cocktail of remarkable variety, their waters a theater of constant change. Oceans: An Illustrated Reference tells the story of this last great frontier. With hundreds of beautiful full-color photographs and explanatory diagrams, charts, and maps, Oceans combines the visual splendor of ocean life with up-to-date scientific information to provide an invaluable and fascinating resource on this vital realm. Although the oceans are vast, their resources are finite. Oceans clearly presents the future challenge to us all--that of ensuring that our common ocean heritage is duly respected, wisely managed, and carefully harnessed for the benefit of the whole planet.

The deep sea, closed until recently to exploration, was long dismissed as lifeless and uninteresting. Only in the last fifty years or so did the deep sea—with its Lilliputian fauna on the seafloor; its seemingly bizarre life forms at mid-ocean depths; its profusion of life at hot vents, cold seeps, and whale falls; and its coldwater corals and fisheries on seamounts and deepwater reefs—reveal itself to be a source of scientific wonderment and, indeed, the planet’s last unexplored frontier. But just as research and exploration are rendering the briny deep accessible, a host of new threats is endangering it—the spread of trawling into the deep ocean, the buildup of humanity’s worst pollutants in deepwater life-forms, the potential consequences of climate change and ocean acidification, and the future mining of seabed minerals and methane hydrates for hydrocarbons. The Silent Deep tells the stories of discovery of the deep sea, the ecologies of its ecosystems, and of the impact of humans, highlighting the importance of global stewardship in keeping this delicate ecosystem alive and well. Written by world renowned deep-sea ecologist Tony Koslow, The Silent Deep is a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the state of the deep sea today, accessible to anyone interested in ocean science, the story of scientific discovery, and conservation of the earth’s most threatened ecosystems.

If Koslow's book fails to convince you of the need to protect the diversity of life in the deep sea, take one look at the Dumbo Octopus and you'll probably have a change of heart. That little guy is just one of the hundreds of bizarre and beautiful creatures featured in this photographic tour of the briny abyss. Combining the latest scientific discoveries with astonishing color imagery, The Deep takes readers on a voyage into the darkest realms of the ocean. Revealing nature’s oddest and most mesmerizing creatures in crystalline detail, The Deep features more than two hundred color photographs of terrifying sea monsters, living fossils, and ethereal bioluminescent creatures, some photographed here for the very first time. Accompanying these breathtaking photographs are contributions from some of the world’s most respected researchers that examine the biology of deep-sea organisms, the ecology of deep-sea habitats, and the history of deep-sea exploration. An unforgettable visual and scientific tour of the teeming abyss, The Deep celebrates the incredible diversity of life on Earth and will captivate anyone intrigued by the unseen—and unimaginable—creatures of the deep sea.

This fall, the Press will publish Alanna Mitchell's Seasick: Ocean Change and the Extinction of Life on Earth, which is already a runaway bestseller in Canada. Here, veteran science journalist Mitchell dives beneath the surface to the sublime depths of sea and science to give readers a sense of how this watery realm can be managed and preserved, and so with it life on earth. Seasick follows scientists working to understand the oceans, and each chapter features a different group of researchers who introduce readers to the importance of ocean currents, the building of coral structures, and the effects of acidification. With Mitchell at the helm, readers are submersed 3000 feet to gather sea sponges that may contribute to cancer care, see firsthand the lava-lamp-like blob of dead zone covering 17000 square kilometers in the Gulf of Mexico, and witness the simultaneous spawning of corals under a full moon in Panama. The first book to look at the planetary environmental crisis through the lens of the global ocean, Seasick takes the reader on an emotional journey across a remarkable landscape and urges conversation and reverence for the fount from which all life on earth sprang.

Be sure to check out all our books on the ocean. May your seas always be smooth!

Archived in Biology | Books for the News
Posted by at 01:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 05, 2009

NYT Sunday Book Review: Bigfoot

NYT contributor Florence Williams begins her review of Joshua Blu Buhs' new book for this weekend's Sunday Book Review:

Because I watched TV in the 1970s, I have an image of Bigfoot stamped on my brain like a paw print. He resembles Chewbacca (minus the bandolier) walking through a grainy forest, scowling over his shoulder at the camera. But your Bigfoot image might be different, because for a while the hairy hominid was everywhere, in B movies and liquor advertisements and docu- and mocumentaries. He also starred in some "real" footage taken in 1967. That one was actually a she, complete with pendulous breasts.
Why did this ginormous, nonexistent ape capture our collective imaginations for five decades, and what does our infatuation say about us? Joshua Blu Buhs, the author of a previous book, about fire ants, takes up these questions in Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend.

Writing with a scientist's skepticism but an enthusiast's deep engagement in Bigfoot Buhs traces the wild and wooly story of America's favorite homegrown monster beginning with nineteenth-century accounts of wildmen roaming the forests of America and treks to the Himalayas to reckon with the Abominable Snowman, all the way to northern California in 1958, when reports of a hairy hominid loping through remote woodlands marked Bigfoot's emergence as a modern marvel. But more than just an entertaining history of the Sasquatch, Buhs book also focuses its attention on a fascinating cultural critique of "the white working-class men who were the beast's advocates, hoaxers, hunters and most ardent consumers." As Williams explains:

Buhs argues compellingly that Bigfoot's heyday in the 1960s and '70s was a difficult time for white, rural men in America. They were threatened by women's rights, civil rights and service-oriented, materialist culture that didn't value working with one's hands or backwoods know-how. Believing in Bigfoot was a way to snub effete, skeptical scientists. Hunting him re-engaged their imperiled backcountry survival skills.… Bigfoot, even in its fakery, was "representative of the really real, the world beyond the facade, a world of life and death and vital things.…"

Insightfully illuminating what this monster say about our modern relationship to wilderness, individuality, class, consumerism, and the media, Buhs' Bigfoot offers definitive take on this elusive beast.

Read the rest of the article in the upcoming New York Times Sunday Book Review or online here. Also see this excerpt from the book and an interview with the author.

June 02, 2009

The definitive wildman

Two recent reviews of Joshua Blu Buhs' new book, Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend focus attention on the author's ability to extract a penetrating cultural critique from his book's unlikely subject. From nineteenth-century accounts of wildmen roaming the forests of America, right up to the claims of two hunters in rural Georgia last August that they killed Bigfoot, Buhs traces the cultural transformation of the myth from its early days when "Bigfoot hunting was a means by which white working class men could… [prove] their manhood in difficult conditions," to its various modern uses as a highly effective marketing tool.

Delivering an insightful exploration of what our fascination with this monster says about our modern relationship to wilderness, individuality, class, consumerism, and the media, Buhs' Bigfoot offers the definitive history of the legendary wildman.

Check out the reviews on the Bookslut website and on John Rimmer's Magonia blog. ("Magonia"—I'll save you a trip to Wikipedia—is a magical land that is described in French folktales.)

Also, read an excerpt from the book and an interview with the author.

Regrets in the wild

jacket image In his column for today's New York Times, John Tierney reports on a recent study that provided what researcher Ben Hayden touted as "the first evidence that monkeys, like people, have 'would-have, could-have, should-have' thoughts. "

Hayden and two other researchers scanned the brains of monkeys who were "trying to win a large prize of juice by guessing where it was hidden. When the monkeys picked wrongly and were shown the location of the prize, the neurons in their brain clearly registered what might have been."

Weighing in on these findings, Mark Bekoff, author of the new Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, told Tierney that "these animals are not as emotionally sophisticated as humans, but they have to know what's right and wrong because it's the only way their social groups can work. Regret is essential, especially in the wild. Humans are very forgiving to their pets, but if a coyote in the wild gets a reputation as a cheater, he's ignored or ostracized, and he ends up leaving the group. "

In fact, as Bekoff and coauthor Jessica Pierce reveal in Wild Justice, animals exhibit a broad repertoire of such behaviors, including fairness, empathy, trust, and reciprocity. Underlying these behaviors, the authors argue, is a complex and nuanced range of emotions, backed by a high degree of intelligence and surprising behavioral flexibility.

In this excerpt, they put it even more succinctly, arguing "in short, that animals have morality."

Archived in Biology | Books for the News
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June 01, 2009

North America's lost abundance

Two new reviews of Steve Nicholls' Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery begin by offering a picture of the North American wilderness before European settlement—rivers teaming with more salmon than water, "colonies of nesting seabirds in nearly unimaginable numbers," and "great herds of ruminants" grazing their way across endless plains—a far cry from the American landscape that most of see today. But while the reality of this unspoiled natural habitat maybe forever lost, both reviews point out that in Paradise Found Nicholls has managed to successfully reproduce its fascinating history. With the benefit of the copious records left behind by the first European settlers, Nicholls employs both historical narrative and scientific inquiry to produce an enthralling description of just what an amazing place North America was and how it looked when the explorers first found it. But more than a celebration of what once was, as Gregory McNamee notes in the Washington Post , Nicholls' book also serves as a potent reminder of how much we have lost along the way, and an urgent call to action for future generations. McNamee writes:

Nicholls's book is an effort at making a blueprint of sorts, a plan by which to rebuild a house whose dimensions we can only guess at. The abundance of nature was what made American independence possible in the first place; our present poverty on so many fronts is a consequence of our maltreatment of that nature. But the knowledge of what we have done, chronicled so carefully in this lucid book, may be the first step toward recovering that squandered wealth.

And Bill McKibben writes in the Boston Globe:

This is a book worth owning, especially since our attack on abundance has happened just slowly enough that we've readjusted our sights ("changing baseline" is Nicholls's phrase) with each generation, never really letting the sheer horror of it all sink in. If we had a time machine, he insists, "I'm convinced that every person alive today would be overawed by the true vitality of nature." Books like this are as close as we're going to get.

To read the full reviews navigate to Boston.com or the Washington Post website. Also, read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Biology | History | Reviews
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May 29, 2009

Animals can tell right from wrong

The research reported in Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce's provocative book Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals is getting coverage around the world.

Bekoff and Pierce argue that animals can act with compassion, altruism, and empathy. Rats, for instance, will not take food if their actions will cause visible pain to another rat. In a chimpanzee group in a Florida zoo, a chimp handicapped by cerebral palsy is rarely subjected to displays of aggression by other males. Elephants help injured or ill members of their herd, and have even show such compassion for members of other species.

Feature articles about the claims made in the book have appeared recently in Australia in The Age ("Puppies may share our moral conscience"), in the UK (from whence we took our title) in the Daily Telegraph and in the Daily Mail, and closer to home in the less-whimsical Denver Post ("Canine emotions raise theological questions.")

Read an excerpt from the book and treat the animals you meet with new respect.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News | Philosophy
Posted by DB at 02:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 20, 2009

Ida: The Multi-Platform Media Darling

As was widely reported today, the so-called "missing link"—the piece in the evolutionary puzzle that definitively ties humans to apes—was identified in Germany. And her name is "Ida." Reports the New York Times:

Fossil remains of a 47-million-year-old animal, found years ago in Germany, have been analyzed more thoroughly and determined to be an extremely early primate close to the emergence of the evolutionary branch leading to monkeys, apes and humans, scientists said in interviews this week.
Described as the “most complete fossil primate ever discovered,” the specimen is a juvenile female the size of a small monkey.

But just as soon as the discovery was announced, accusations of showmanship and exaggeration were lobbied at the scientific team behind the findings. (It's hard not to wonder whether Google, long famous for its sparse homepage, changed its logo to celebrate the discovery or as part of a larger publicity campaign.) In unpacking the implications of scientific discovery in an age of social media and orchestrated press events, the Christian Science Monitor wrote:

But almost as dazzling as the find itself was the way in which it was unveiled. The announcement was made with great fanfare at the Museum of Natural History in New York, and coincided with a peer-reviewed article about the discovery. And like any good reality television star, [Jorn] Hurum was thinking “cross-platform”: his team has a sleek website, an exclusive interview arrangement with ABC News, a book aimed at mainstream audiences, a deal with the History Channel, and a full-length movie about little “Ida.”

This troubling commingling of science and media has worried some observers. But far from being a modern phenomenon, earth scientists have long had a reputation for creating hype. Ralph O'Connor's 2008 book The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856 reveals how shrewd science-writers marketed spectacular visions of past worlds, piquing the public imagination with glimpses of man-eating mammoths, talking dinosaurs, and sea-dragons spawned by Satan himself. These authors—including men of science, women, clergymen, biblical literalists, hack writers, blackmailers, and prophets—borrowed freely from the Bible, modern poetry, and the urban entertainment industry, creating new forms of literature in order to transport their readers into a vanished and alien past. Although "Ida" passed through a peer-review process, unlike the specimens proffered by hypemen of the Victorian era, the over-the-top nature of her unveiling certainly resembles the tactics of the discredited showmen of O'Connor's book.

Whether you want to learn more about fantastic monsters of deep time or the men behind the discovery of geohistory, Chicago's books on paleontology and earth science are the missing link in your personal collection. Check out all of our books in these related fields and decide for yourself if Ida answers more questions than she raises.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by at 01:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 19, 2009

Press Release: Buhs, Bigfoot

Let’s get this straight from the start: Bigfoot doesn’t exist. All the reported sightings are almost certainly either mistakes or hoaxes. At the same time, Bigfoot is America’s premier homegrown monster, a figure as familiar as—if far hairier than—Uncle Sam. And he remains big news: when two men from rural Georgia claimed last autumn that they’d killed a Bigfoot, reporters and camera crews flocked to their press conference, and more than 1,000 news stories followed worldwide.

Just what makes this shaggy beast so enduring? With Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, Joshua Blu Buhs hacks his way through the forest of myths, mysteries, and pseudoscience surrounding Bigfoot to write a cultural history of this modern monster. Buhs begins his trek in the forests of nineteenth-century America, with tales of wildmen roaming the hills; he then travels to the Himalayas to come to grips (not literally) with the Abominable Snowman, then back to the late 1950s in northern California, where the contemporary creature first emerged as a media marvel. Along the way, we meet hunters and hucksters, charlatans and serious seekers, as Buhs travels the back roads of America in an attempt to understand Bigfoot’’s hold on our imagination. Just what does all the ensuing cryptozoology and craziness say about our modern relationship to wilderness, individuality, and the media?

Though Buhs always keeps his skeptic’s eye open, he writes with an enthusiast’s deep love for his subject; the result is a biography of Bigfoot that will leave other hunters following its footprints for years to come.

Read the press release.

Also, see an excerpt and an interview with the author.

May 12, 2009

Do animals have moral intelligence?

Last week the Boulder newspaper The Daily Camera published an interesting article about Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce's provocative new book Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals. The review begins:

[The authors] waste no time in getting to the point: "(W)e argue that animals feel empathy for each other, treat one another fairly, cooperate toward common goals, and help each other out of trouble," they write in the first sentence. "We argue, in short, that animals have morality."

Advancing bioethicist's arguments about the moral treatment of animals to posit animals themselves as moral agents, the author's place moral behavior firmly within an evolutionary context demonstrating how a variety of species are in fact incredibly adept social beings, relying on rules of conduct to navigate intricate social networks that are essential to their survival. The Daily Camera's Clay Evans continues:

Most of the species examined by the authors are notably "intelligent" and social. Hyenas, wolves, elephants and primates predominate, though other, "lesser" species like rats have their moments on stage. Bekoff is always a pleasant read, but the book's tales of animal cooperation will bring a smile to many readers' faces (or a tear to their eyes).…
For readers hardened into anthropocentric views, it will seem like nonsense easily attributed to wishful thinking. To others it will raise uncomfortable questions about the way we treat animals, as well as concepts of human uniqueness and "superiority."

And who knows? Decades hence, Bekoff might prove a powerful prophet, and we'll wonder how we could have ever treated cognizant, emotional, moral beings with such cruelty.

Read the rest if the review on the Daily Camera website.

Archived in Biology | Philosophy | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 27, 2009

Swine flu—infectious disease in a global age

The rapid migration of the potentially deadly strain of H1N1 flu virus, recently discovered to have originated in Mexico, is a potent reminder of the new and pressing challenges to public health in the global age. With documented cases already appearing in the U.S. and Europe, and over 1800 suspected cases worldwide, health officials—including the World Health Organization—are still waiting to assess the potential of the swine flu to transform itself into a pandemic.

Among the factors most concerning to those monitoring the outbreak is the virus's relatively high mortality rate among the cases documented in Mexico, and, as the Washington Post recently noted, its tendency to affect "relatively young adults, presumably among the population's most healthy"—a feature which some already are connecting to the 1919 Spanish flu pandemic. Caused by a strain of influenza that killed via a cytokine storm (overreaction of the body's immune system), victims of the Spanish flu were also younger and healthier than those normally thought most susceptible. The strong immune systems of young adults ravaged the body, whereas the weaker immune systems of children and middle-aged adults caused fewer deaths.

But while the 1919 pandemic resulted so many fatalities, it has also provided scientists with an invaluable source of information to prevent similar tragedies today. One of the most comprehensive of these studies available to the general reader was published by the press last year in Infectious Disease: A Scientific American Reader. In the study, "Capturing a Killer Flu Virus," Jeffrey K. Taubenberger, Ann H. Reid and Thomas G. Fanning undertake a thorough investigation of the 1919 Spanish flu outbreak, suggest treatments, and recommend preventative measures. Set alongside 29 more of the most significant articles on communicable illness published in the pages of Scientific American magazine since 1993, Infectious Disease is the essential sourcebook for anyone looking for the science behind today's headlines.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News
Posted by TXM at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

April 23, 2009

Everything old is new again

The "Home & Garden" section of today's New York Times features a story on a group of horticulturalists who have dedicated themselves to a unique gardening project that combines antiquarianism, botany, and a bit of banditry to preserve the heirloom roses of New York City.

According to the article, roses "captured the hearts of early New Yorkers" prompting many amateur rosarians in the city to breed and cultivate their own varieties, many of which gained world wide popularity during the late nineteenth century. But while horticulturalists one hundred years ago took the availability of a wide variety of cultivars for granted, more recently the mass production of the more profitable "hybrid tea roses," to the exclusion of everything else, has drastically decreased the available selection. Now, rose enthusiasts like Douglas Brenner, Stephen Scanniello, and Betty Vickers—the so called "rose rustlers" featured in the NYT article—have made it their task to seek out and re-propagate the antique species, often by raiding old estates and cemeteries and to take cuttings of feral plants.

Back in 2002 we reprinted the classic story of antique rose collectors and their crusade in Thomas Christopher's In Search of Lost Roses. Detailing the heritage of 2,500 years of breeding and gardening, and the eccentric personalities determined to preserve and protect it, In Search of Lost Roses offers a fun and edifying tale perfect for spring reading.

To find out more about the book read this excerpt and an interview with the author.

Read the rest of the article about the resurgence of New York's heirloom roses on the NYT website.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News | History
Posted by TXM at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 17, 2009

The story of seeds

As Chicago finally begins to see some springlike weather, the bits of color beginning to make their way back into the landscape serve as a reminder of the abundance of dormant life that's been waiting patiently beneath the soot and the snow for the last six months. Thus, there is perhaps no other book on the press's frontlist more apropos to the season than Jonathan Silvertown's An Orchard Invisible: A Natural History of Seeds—a book that presents the oft-ignored seed with the natural history it deserves, one nearly as varied and surprising as the springtime flora itself. As a review in yesterday's Seattle Times notes, the book approaches its subject from a variety of angles "among them sexuality, pollination, dispersal, germination, predators and diseases, and the use of seeds, in all their glory, in gastronomy" (see this an excerpt on barley seeds and beer brewing). But the author never lets us forget that the driving force behind the story of seeds—its theme, even—is evolution, with its irrepressible habit of stumbling upon new solutions to the challenges of life.

Written with a scientist's knowledge and a gardener's delight, An Orchard Invisible offers those wonders in a package that will be irresistible to science buffs and green thumbs alike.

To find out more about An Orchard Invisible and other books by Jonathan Silvertown navigate to the press's website, or to see some of the author's other projects, navigate to his website at www.jonathansilvertown.com.

Archived in Biology | Reviews
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April 15, 2009

Press Release: Silvertown, An Orchard Invisible

Every year around this time, dedicated gardeners tear open packets of seeds and carefully bury them in the rich soil of their gardens, where, months later, they emerge as beautiful flowers, delectable herbs, and nutritious vegetables. All from those tiny, unimpressive seeds …

With An Orchard Invisible, Jonathan Silvertown finally gives the humble seed its due. His richly anecdotal natural history begins with the first appearance of seeds—which evolved from fernlike ancestors nearly 400 million years ago—and from there spans the globe and traverses epochs all the way to the present. Deftly marrying science and culture, Silvertown explores the evolution of seeds and the wide variety of uses to which humans have put them over the centuries, from spices to perfumes, dyes to pharmaceuticals. Along the way, he delves into such unexpected topics as the Salem witch trials and Lyme disease, while never losing sight of the real story behind all the world of seeds: the constant drive of evolution, with its irrepressible habit of stumbling upon new and better solutions to the challenges of life on earth.Writing with winning charm and an eye for unforgettable details, Silvertown has crafted a book sure to delight gardeners and science buffs alike.

Read the press release.

Also, read an excerpt and see the author's website.

Archived in Biology | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 17, 2009

Naive elk

Author Joel Berger did an interview last Saturday for the Bob Edwards Weekend show about his new book, The Better to Eat You With: Fear in the Animal World. Berger begins by citing his experience watching several wolves—recently reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park after a sixty-year absence—as they stalked and killed an elk that, to Berger's surprise, remained oblivious to the danger until it was too late. This lead Berger to the hypothesis that after only six decades, the elk had forgotten to fear a species that had survived by eating them for millennia. In the interview Berger expands on this idea citing a distinctly non-genetic aspect of the animal's fear response that he attributes instead to a cultural element within the animal kingdom, comparing the elk's behavior to a hypothetical naive tourist wandering through a tough neighborhood. Listen to the archived podcast of the show at podcast.com.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology
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March 03, 2009

Drug money

An article in yesterday's New York Times reveals some not so startling facts about corporate interests infiltrating the ivory tower at Harvard's Medical School where the American Medical Student Association recently brought the school under national scrutiny by giving it an F grade in terms of how well it monitors and controls drug industry money. The article begins with one entering medical student's tale of innocence lost:

In a first-year pharmacology class at Harvard Medical School, Matt Zerden grew wary as the professor promoted the benefits of cholesterol drugs and seemed to belittle a student who asked about side effects.
Mr. Zerden later discovered something by searching online that he began sharing with his classmates. The professor was not only a full-time member of the Harvard Medical faculty, but a paid consultant to 10 drug companies, including five makers of cholesterol treatments.

"I felt really violated," Mr. Zerden, now a fourth-year student, recently recalled. "Here we have 160 open minds trying to learn the basics in a protected space, and the information he was giving wasn't as pure as I think it should be."

But on the other side of the issue are many arguments about the enabling funding that drug companies provide, made all the more enticing to school faculty and administrators in the context of the current economic downturn. The NYT article cites: Dr. Thomas P. Stossel, "a Harvard Medical professor who has served on advisory boards for Merck, Biogen Idec and Dyax, and has written widely on academic-industry ties. 'I think if you look at it with intellectual honesty, you see industry interaction has produced far more good than harm.'"

You can read the rest of the article on the NYT website, but for a more thorough treatment of these contentious issues we offer acclaimed journalist Daniel S. Greenberg's Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism. In his book, Greenberg reveals a middle path, suggesting that while the threat has been overhyped, the need for oversight is real and a valuable asset to the integrity of academic science. From research that has shifted overseas so corporations can avoid regulations to conflicts of interest in scientific publishing, Greenberg argues that the temptations of money will always be a threat, but they can be effectively countered through the vigilance of scientists, the press, and the public. Based on extensive, candid interviews with scientists and administrators, Science for Sale is an indispensable resource for anyone who cares about the future of scientific research.

Find out more about the book on the UCP website or read the rest of the article.

February 26, 2009

The Science of Cute

kitten hiding under a pink blanket In the latest installment of the series "The Science of YouTube," the folks over at Popular Science investigate why videos of cute things--sleepy kittens, fluffy puppies, and sneezing baby pandas—are so popular and compelling. It turns out that Konrad Lorenz, Austrian ethologist, Nobel-prize winner, and subject of Richard W. Burkhardt Jr.'s Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology, had some theories about cuteness nearly sixty years before YouTube would become the internet's repository of all videos prosh. Lorenz theorized that certain "infantile features"—like big heads, large eyes, button noses, and round bodies—trigger a nurturing response in adults. Evolutionarily, this makes us more likely to care for our offspring, but our preference for cuteness is so strong it spills over to other species. So, the next time you catch yourself browsing cuteoverload.com, remember, resistance is futile—you are evolutionarily hard wired to say "awwwwwww."

For more on Konrad Lorenz and the science of ethology, check out Burkhardt's award-winning book.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News
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February 20, 2009

Shortlisted for the Diagram Prize

We are bemused to note that our book Baboon Metaphysics is shortlisted for the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year, an annual competition conducted by The Bookseller in the UK. The Diagram Prize, perhaps the least-coveted award in the publishing industry, began at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1978 when it was won by the memorable Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice. Close to thirty books have since been honored. The Press is usually named as the publisher of the 1988 winner, Versailles: The View From Sweden, though we only distributed that book for its publisher, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. (And, no, the book was not about high-powered telescopes.)

Previous winners of the Diagram Prize have tended toward the obscure (The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling), the suggestive (The Joy of Sex, the Pocket Edition), and the obscurely suggestive (Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality). The current competition is no exception, including shortlisted titles such as The Large Sieve and its Applications, Strip and Knit with Style, and Curbside Consultation of the Colon.

The winner of the Diagram Prize will be decided by a public vote on The Bookseller website. Please vote early and vote often.

Our honored title—as you can learn in an excerpt— is derived from a quote by Charles Darwin: "He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke."

Archived in Awards | Biology
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February 10, 2009

Of course, it's Darwin's birthday too

Martin Buber is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Based on the overwhelming anecdotal evidence, this week must have one of the highest-ever concentrations of famous birthdays. In addition to the Lincoln bicentennial to which it seems we've been building up—especially in Illinois—for over a year now, Darwin's equally talked-about 200th birthday also occurs on February 12.

In recognition of the occasion, the New York Times devotes today's Science Times to a suite of stories about Darwin and his lasting influence, not the least of which is this column on "Charles Darwin: Live & In Concert."

The Darwin special inspired our own roundup, which begins with Darwin's own The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, a volume which, as today's Times put it, traces "connections between humans and animals in the muscles used to express emotions such as grief and terror."

In Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior, Robert Richards discusses the celebrated scientist's ideas about instinct, reason, and morality, against the background of Darwin's personality, training, scientific and cultural concerns, and intellectual community.

The relationship between science and religion is, of course, one of the issues most popularly discussed today in light of Darwin's work, and David Sloan Wilson's Darwin's Cathedral takes the radical step of joining the two, but not in the usual fashion. The key, Wilson argues, is to think of society as an organism-one in which morality and religion are adaptations that allow groups of humans to function as a coherent whole.

The Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism takes a more specifically focused approach to this issue, exploring how Jewish discussions of evolution have been shaped by the intersections of faith, science, philosophy, and ideology in specific historical contexts.

And, finally, Keith Stanovich's The Robot's Rebellion (excerpt) responds to decades of research in evolutionary biology and cognitive science that have led many esteemed scientists to the conclusion that, according to the precepts of universal Darwinism, humans are merely the hosts for two replicators (genes and memes) that have no interest in us except as conduits for replication. Accepting and now forcefully responding to this decentering and disturbing idea, Stanovich provides the tools for the "robot's rebellion," a program of cognitive reform necessary to advance human interests over the limited interest of the replicators and define our own autonomous goals as individual human beings.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News
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February 03, 2009

Go deeper than Google

jacket image In this morning's story about the new version of Google Earth, which for the first time lets users explore Earth's oceans, the New York Times notes that "organizations seeking to reconnect people directly with nature expressed guarded optimism when the new features of Google Earth were described."

"Electronic images can boost awareness and sometimes even inspire, but there's no substitute for direct experience in nature," Cheryl Charles, president of Children and Nature Network, told the paper. "Hopefully those exploring Google's virtual oceans, especially children, can still find the time to get wet, as well."

While it's too cold in many parts of the world to make that a pleasant prospect, we have what is perhaps the next-best thing: beautiful books on the oceans and marine life that—long before Google Earth—literally put in our hands a new view of ocean depths around the globe, giving us a glimpse of worlds rarely seen.

With hundreds of beautiful full-color photographs and explanatory diagrams, charts, and maps, Dorrik Stow's Oceans combines the visual splendor of ocean life with up-to-date scientific information to provide an invaluable and fascinating resource on this vital realm.

jacket image Tony Koslow's The Silent Deep, meanwhile, tells the story of the exploration and discovery of the deep sea, the ecology of its diverse environments, and the impact of humans, highlighting the importance of global stewardship in keeping this delicate ecosystem alive and well.

jacket image And, of course, we couldn't talk about this topic without mentioning Claire Nouvian's The Deep, which features more than two hundred color photographs of terrifying sea monsters, living fossils, and ethereal bioluminescent creatures, some photographed for the very first time. Though turning the book's glossy pages to reveal each new creature is an experience we wouldn't want you to miss, these electronic images are pretty cool, too.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News | Cartography and Geography
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January 27, 2009

Do animals have a sense of morality?

Scientists have long counseled against interpreting animal behavior in terms of human emotions, warning that such anthropomorphizing limits our ability to understand animals as they really are. But in a recent opinion piece for Boulder, Colorado's Daily Camera, Marc Bekoff, author of the forthcoming Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, cites numerous examples of animal behavior that he claims would be quite difficult to explain otherwise. Bekoff's article begins:

Do animals have a sense of morality? Do they know right from wrong? In our forthcoming book, Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, philosopher Jessica Pierce and I argue that the answer to both of these questions is a resounding "yes." "Ought" and "should" regarding what's right and what's wrong play important roles in the social interactions of animals, just as they do in ours. …
Consider the following scenarios. A teenage female elephant nursing an injured leg is knocked over by a rambunctious hormone-laden teenage male. An older female sees this happen, chases the male away, and goes back to the younger female and touches her sore leg with her trunk.

Eleven elephants rescue a group of captive antelope in KwaZula-Natal; the matriarch elephant undoes all of the latches on the gates of the enclosure with her trunk and lets the gate swing open so the antelope can escape.

A rat in a cage refuses to push a lever for food when it sees that another rat receives an electric shock as a result. A male Diana monkey who learned to insert a token into a slot to obtain food helps a female who can't get the hang of the trick, inserting the token for her and allowing her to eat the food reward.…

Animals are incredibly adept social actors: they form intricate networks of relationships and live by rules of conduct that maintain social balance, or what we call social homeostasis. Humans should be proud of their citizenship in the animal kingdom. We're not the sole occupants of the moral arena.

Read the rest of the article on the Daily Camera website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology | Philosophy
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January 07, 2009

Press Release: Denis Wood and John Fels, The Natures of Maps

Any time we plan a trip, whether it’s as simple as a trek to the other side of town or as complicated as a cross-country drive, our journeys are influenced, guided, and even inspired by maps. Road maps get us to our destinations, while maps of attractions like national parks and wilderness areas entice us to include such wonders in our vacation plans. But do those maps do more than just show off the natural beauties they describe? Could there be hidden agendas at work in even a map as seemingly benign as a National Park Service map of the Grand Canyon?

According to Denis Wood and John Fels, the answer is a resounding yes. Cartographers have agreed for decades that territorial or political maps are far from objective representations of reality; rather, maps can’t help but reflect the agendas and intentions of their creators. Until now, however, maps of nature—from depictions of bird migration routes to state park campground maps—have been left out of this analysis. Both researchers and map users—including many who should know better—have wrongly presumed that such maps are strictly scientific, free from the subtexts or biases that mar other maps. With The Natures of Maps, Wood and Fels are here to show otherwise.

Using stunning full-color reproductions of a wide variety of maps, The Natures of Maps reveals all the hidden ways in which maps make claims about the natural world and our place in it. Looking at everything from color schemes to titles to even the ways maps are folded, Wood and Fels show us the secrets under the surface—and teach us to read the natural world with fresh eyes.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Cartography and Geography | Press Releases
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December 17, 2008

'Tis the Season for Discomedusae

A prominent promoter of Darwin in Germany, Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) was a pioneering biologist in his own right: he gave currency to the idea of the "missing link" between apes and man, formulated the concept of ecology, and promulgated the "biogenetic law"—the idea that the embryo of an advanced species recapitulates the stages the species went through in its evolutionary descent. But today, with detractors ranging from paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould to modern-day creationists and advocates of Intelligent Design, Haeckel is dogged by accusations of forgery and unfortunate associations with National Socialism. The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought aims to rehabilitate this tattered reputation, and, as the Times Literary Supplement noted earlier this year, "[Robert J.] Richards suceeds brilliantly in re-establishing Haeckel as a significant scientist and a major figure in the history of evolutionary thought."

In the field, a sketch pad was as essential to Haeckel as a microscope, and his extraordinary scientific illustrations—of undulating siphonophorae and crouched embryos—remain icons of biological art. And, at least according to John Holbo over at Crooked Timber, they are perfect for seasons greetings. Holbo has created a Flickr gallery featuring manipulations of plates from Haeckel's 1904 Kunstformen der Natur [Artforms of Nature] bathed in green and red, complete with charming lines of holiday cheer. And he even has set up a Cafepress store. For the evolutionary biologist in your life, might I suggest sending a card featuring a yule discomedusa with a copy of, naturally, The Tragic Sense of Life? Happy holidays!

Archived in Biology | Commentary
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December 02, 2008

Press Release: Barnes and Dupré, Genomes and What to Make of Them

The mapping of the human genome at the turn of the twenty-first century by the Human Genome Project was a scientific sensation. The media abounded with stories about our new knowledge of the building blocks of human life and the tremendous medical breakthroughs that were sure to follow—while other accounts put a darker spin on the achievement, warning of consequences from genetic discrimination to designer germs.

For the layman, the claims and counterclaims can be dizzying; it's hard to know just what the genomics revolution is likely to mean in our everyday lives. With Genomes and What to Make of Them, Barry Barnes and John Dupré cut through the confusion and offer a smart and straightforward account of what we know, what we can hope for, and what, if anything, we should fear. Opening with a brief history of genetics and genomics, from Mendel to Watson and Crick to Craig Venter, Genomes and What to Make of Them explains what genomics tells us about our evolutionary history and what it can reveal on the individual level, such as our risk of disease. Meanwhile, the authors argue, the dangers of genetic research—from biological warfare to a revived eugenics—are very real, and only a proactive government and a vigilant citizenry can ensure the full life-enhancing potential of this exciting new science. Engagingly written and up-to-date, Genomes and What to Make of Them is both a primer on current knowledge and a road map to an exciting future.

Read the press release. Also, listen to an interview with the author.

November 24, 2008

When pirates are chasing you when you are chasing science at sea

Pirates have been making headlines recently, and not the dreamy Johnny Depp kind of pirates, either. Armed buccaneers off the coast of East Africa prey on cargo ships hauling food, expensive machinery, and oil. According to USA Today, pirate attacks in the Gulf of Aden and off Somalia are up 75% this year. We asked our resident high-seas expert Ellen Prager if she had ever had an encounter with a pirate, Jack Sparrow-esque or more malevolent, while chasing science at sea. Here's what she had to say:

When planning for fieldwork, ocean scientists usually think about research instruments, supplies, food, and, of course, safety. And that last one now includes the very real potential of encountering pirates. Today, Somali pirates are getting bolder, as evidenced by the recent hijacking of a Saudi supertanker filled with millions of dollars worth of oil. But in August of 2001, it was a research vessel that was at risk. Armed assailants pursued the US Research Vessel Maurice Ewing while they were in waters 30 km off the coast of Somalia. The crew was able to fend off the attackers, but the incident spurred great concern within the scientific community and funding agencies. After the close call, new operating procedures for many research vessels were put in place along with improved security training and preparation for the crew.
I too have had an encounter—okay, an almost encounter—with pirates. While on a geological field trip in a remote area of the Bahamas a boat in the distance radioed for assistance, reporting that they were lost. The captain and mate onboard our boat gave them a course to set to where they wanted to go, but the boat turned toward us instead, on a direct course to intersect. The mate was suspicious as we were in a very remote area where pirates were known to attack boats to steal the valuables aboard and strip out electronics. He got on the bow with a very large and visible gun. When the other boat got closer to us, close enough to see that we were wary and prepared, it made a sharp change of course, heading back the way they had come, and not, I may point out, in the direction where they were supposedly headed. We were all relieved, to say the least, that we avoided becoming the victims of piracy on the high seas!

For more about the swashbuckling life of an ocean scientist, read an excerpt from the book or click here to learn more about Chasing Science at Sea.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News
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October 21, 2008

David Berreby on identity politics

Especially in an election year, we sort sort ourselves into distinct social groups. But exactly how do we make those choices, and what external factors might affect our decision making process? To find out more about the associating and polarizing power of politics, science writer John Horgan conducted a timely interview last week with David Berreby, author of Us and Them: The Science of Identity for bloggingheads.tv. In the interview Berreby discusses several issues particularly relevant to the upcoming elections including "reality and illusion in racial concepts" and "McCain's failure to exploit identity politics," among other topics.

Check out the complete interview at blogginheads.tv.

For more timely social commentary from an award winning science writer navigate to Berreby's blog at www.usthemblog.com.

October 08, 2008

My, what sharp teeth you have!

Our neighbors to the north in Wisconsin recently took issue with a federal court ruling in late September that overturned the Bush administration's decision to remove gray wolves of the Great Lakes region from the endangered species list. The editorial board of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that the wolf population in the state has more than doubled—from 250 in 2001 to more than 550 today—which is good, and that farmers struggle to defend their crops and livestock against these predators, which is bad. (For more on Wisconsin's environmental past and future, be sure to check out The Vanishing Present: Wisconsin's Changing Lands, Waters, and Wildlife edited by Donald M. Waller and Thomas P. Rooney.)

All this talk of wolves and prey got us thinking about Joel Berger's new book, The Better to Eat You With, out next month. Maybe it's not the wolves that are the problem; maybe it's the prey. Perhaps they've forgotten to fear wolves in the time their population had dwindled. Berger witnessed a similar phenomenon in Yellowstone: after a sixty-year absence of wolves from the park the elk had forgotten to fear a species that had survived by eating them for hundreds of millennia. His book follows his quest to answer three important questions about the relationship between predator and prey: Can naive animals avoid extinction when they encounter reintroduced carnivores? To what extent is fear culturally transmitted? And how can a better understanding of current predator-prey behavior help demystify past extinctions and inform future conservation? We think Berger's insights could be valuable as our northern neighbors confront their wolf problem.

For more on these fearsome creatures, check out the appropriately titled Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation by L. David Mech and Luigi Boitani or read an excerpt. And for more on the predator-prey relationship, try Tim Caro's Antipredator Defenses in Birds and Mammals. Or, of course, there is always Little Red Riding Hood. But that didn't turn out so well for our heroine, did it?

Archived in Biology | Commentary
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Hundreds of new deep sea species discovered in Australia

Word comes today from down under that ocean scientists exploring previously uncharted undersea mountains and canyons in the Southern Ocean have discovered 274 new marine species heretofore unknown to science. Reports the Environment Minister Peter Garrett: "It's extraordinary to think that we've put someone on the moon and we're very familiar with lots of parts of the planet, we've got Google Earth and yet here we are, we've got parts of the planet that have never been sighted or explored before." We couldn't agree more.

The deep sea is mostly uncharted—only about 5 percent of the seafloor has been mapped with any reasonable degree of detail—and current estimates about the number of species yet to be found vary between ten and thirty million. For a look at some of the awe-inspiring creatures of the deep that we have discovered, check out Claire Nouvian's eye-popping The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss and a gallery of the some of the wonders of the murky abyss.

Archived in Biology | Commentary
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October 02, 2008

Oceana's annual Freakiest Fish contest

Here's a fun one: just in time for Halloween, the ocean conservation group Oceana is launching its third annual Freakiest Fish contest. To participate just navigate to their website and vote for the picture of the fish you think is the freakiest. If the one you vote for wins, Oceana will automatically enter you into a drawing to receive free tickets to the IMAX film Deep Sea 3D! Plus one very lucky voter gets a copy of Claire Nouvian's The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss, which includes images of all thirteen of the freaky fish featured in the contest, and hundreds more.

Navigate to the Oceana website for more info on the contest, or to see more pictures of freaky fish check out this special website we created for The Deep.

Archived in Biology | Commentary
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October 01, 2008

Press Release: LaFollette, Science on the Air

Join expeditions on the frontiers of research! Listen as eminent men of science tell of their achievements! Just as Watson Davis beckoned listeners to gather around their radios for his broadcast of Adventures in Science, so too does Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette invite readers to travel back in time to the heyday of science programming in Science on the Air.

Before the dawn of television, programs like Our Friend the Atom, The World Is Yours, and Cavalcade of America flourished. But with broadcasting success came the directive to entertain, not just educate. Science on the Air chronicles the efforts of science popularizers as they negotiated topic, content, and tone in order to gain precious time on the air. Offering a new perspective on the collision between science’s idealistic and elitist view of public communication and the unbending economics of broadcasting, LaFollette rewrites the history of the public reception of science in the twentieth century and the role that scientists and their institutions have played in both encouraging and inhibiting popularization. By looking at the broadcasting of the past, Science on the Air raises issues of concern to all those who seek to cultivate a scientifically literate society today.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases
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September 29, 2008

Revealing the watery world of ocean scientists

Last Saturday's Wall Street Journal contains an enthusiastic review of Ellen Prager's new book Chasing Science at Sea: Racing Hurricanes, Stalking Sharks, and Living Undersea with Ocean Experts. Writing for the WSJ Michael J. Ybarra begins his review:

Ellen Prager would seem to have an enviable job: traveling the world to unravel the mysteries of the deep. "For the uninitiated, spending days doing research while cruising aboard a ship or living on a remote tropical island sounds glamorous, a vacation of sorts," she writes in Chasing Science at Sea. "Glamour rarely comes into it."
Ms. Prager, the chief scientist at Aquarius Reef Base in the Florida Keys, the world's only undersea research station, uses breezy, accessible prose to evoke the beauty and magic of the underwater world—as well as the banalities of working as a scientist in an alien environment. She describes collecting fish poop, writing grant proposals (the competition among ocean scientists for money "is fierce"), and battling seasickness and skin rash from prolonged immersion. And Ms. Prager decries the alarming changes she perceives in the world's oceans, including dying coral reefs, decimated fish stocks and the spread of algae blooms that "can kill fish and render the sea unlivable." The reasons for such aquatic degradation, she says, include pollution, over-fishing and global warming.

But Chasing Science at Sea is hardly dominated by eco-lamentation; Ms. Prager is too intoxicated with her job for that. "I've encountered equipment-stealing sea lions in the Galápagos, worked with ex-NFL football players turned underwater shark-wrestling stuntmen, nearly capsized on a trawler while entering a dangerous inlet, faced a hurricane at sea with a boat full of undergraduates, and stood waist-deep in steaming mud as turkey vultures circled overhead."

Read the rest of the review on the Wall Street Journal website.

September 23, 2008

Nancy G. Siraisi a MacArthur "Genius"

Press author Nancy G. Siraisi, a Brooklyn-based medical historian, is one of the twenty-five new fellows announced this morning by the MacArthur Foundation. The MacArthur Fellowships, known as "genius grants," provide each recipient with $500,000 over five years, no strings attached. MacArthur's widely reported announcement noted that the grants "offer the opportunity for Fellows to accelerate their current activities or take their work in new directions."

They are intended to celebrate "extraordinarily creative individuals who inspire new heights in human achievement," MacArthur President Jonathan Fanton said in an announcement on the foundation's Web site. Siraisi, for her part, "continues to provide contributions to the evolving scholarly understanding of medical history and, specifically, Renaissance intellectual history." In Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice, for example, she explores the inner workings of the medical community and illustrates the connections of medicine to both natural philosophy and technical skills.

As we congratulate Nancy Siraisi, we proudly add her name to the growing list of Press authors who have received the genius grant, including Stuart Dybek, a 2007 MacAurthur Fellow; George Lewis, a 2002 fellow whose book A Power Stronger Than Itself we published earlier this year; Danielle Allen, author of Talking to Strangers; and David Shulman, whose new Spring, Heat, Rains the Press will publish in November.

Archived in Biology | History
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September 16, 2008

Press Release: Prager, Chasing Science at Sea

To the average office-dweller, marine scientists seem to have the good life: cruising at sea for weeks at a time, swimming in warm coastal waters, living in tropical paradises. But ocean scientists who go to sea will tell you that it is no vacation. Creature comforts are few and the obstacles seemingly insurmountable, yet an abundance of wonder and discovery still awaits those who take to the ocean. Chasing Science at Sea immerses readers in the world of those who regularly go to sea—aquanauts living underwater, marine biologists seeking unseen life in the deep ocean, and the tall-ship captains at the helm, among others—and tells the fascinating tale of what life—and science—is like at the mercy of Mother Nature.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Press Releases
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Reconstructing geohistory

The current issue of Science magazine contains a glowing review of Martin J. S. Rudwick's latest book, Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform. Reviewer Ralph J. O'Conner notes that Worlds Before Adam follows up on Rudwick's previous book, Bursting the Limits of Time, to cover the second phase (1820-1845) of a revolutionary period in the history of science in which scientists began to make important discoveries that transformed their conception of geological history and redefined human understanding of our place in the natural world. Praising both books for their clarity and insight O'Connor writes:

Like [Bursting the Limits of Time], Worlds Before Adam is the product of painstaking research. It appears dauntingly long but is a delight to read. Rudwick's style is lucid and engaging throughout, and he is unfailingly courteous to his nonspecialist readers, ensuring that all terms and concepts are fully explained and avoiding unnecessary jargon. The book's strictly chronological arrangement gives it a strong narrative thrust, and its many beautifully printed illustrations and generous quotations from original sources enhance the sense of primary contact with the evidence.…
In these two graceful and judicious volumes, Rudwick has restored geology to its rightful historical place at the heart of modern scientific culture. More than this, he enables readers to experience geology as a new science. By immersing us in the investigations, reflections, and debates of the time, he lifts us out of our present-day perspective so that we see the objects of geology afresh, through the astonished eyes of those who created it.

Navigate to the Science website to read the review.

Also see all our titles by Martin J. S. Rudwick.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
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September 15, 2008

Press Release: A Scientific American Reader, Infectious Disease

This year marks the ninetieth anniversary of the Influenza Epidemic of 1918, but the fear of another global viral plague is far from history. As evidenced by the panic in recent years over everything from SARS to drug-resistant tuberculosis, infectious diseases still cause worldwide alarm and remain a significant threat to international health.

Infectious Disease collects thirty of the most exciting, innovative, and significant articles on communicable illness published in the pages of Scientific American magazine since 1993. With sections devoted to viral infections, the immune system, and global management and treatment issues, it provides both general readers and students with an excellent overview of recent research in the field.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Press Releases
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September 08, 2008

Tempests at Sea

As of posting time, the latest in a series of strong storms swirling in the Atlantic ocean, Hurricane Ike, was about 50 miles west of Cuba, and moving westward at 14 mph, according to the Weather Channel. Though with landfall, Ike had weakened to a category two storm, with winds near 100 mph, meteorologists predict the hurricane will strengthen as it moves into the Caribbean Sea. Current projections have Ike pointed toward the still-recovering Gulf Coast of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, with landfall possible this weekend.

The Gustav-Hanna-Ike chain of hurricanes comes just as Nature reports that hurricanes are becoming more virulent, and global warming may be the cause.

Continue reading "Tempests at Sea" »

Archived in Biology | Books for the News
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September 03, 2008

Press Release: O'Connell, The Elephant's Secret Sense

New in Paperback—While observing a family of elephants in the wild, Caitlin O'Connell noticed a peculiar listening behavior—the matriarch lifted her foot and scanned the horizon, causing the other elephants to follow suit, as if they could "hear" the ground. The Elephant's Secret Sense is O'Connell's account of her groundbreaking research into seismic listening and communication, chronicling the extraordinary social lives of elephants over the course of fourteen years in the Namibian wilderness.

This compelling odyssey of scientific discovery is also a frank account of fieldwork in a poverty-stricken, war-ravaged country. In her attempts to study an elephant community, O'Connell encounters corrupt government bureaucrats, deadly lions and rhinos, poachers, farmers fighting for arable land, and profoundly ineffective approaches to wildlife conservation. The Elephant's Secret Sense is ultimately a story of intellectual courage in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Press Releases
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August 19, 2008

Press Release: Maloney, Chicago Gardens

After pulling apart the peonies and deadheading the last of the mums, gardeners will take a long look at their backyards and head indoors to plan for next season. And as the hostas yellow and wilt outside, nature enthusiasts can take shelter with—and inspiration from—the stories in Cathy Jean Maloney’s beautiful new book, Chicago Gardens: The Early History.

Maloney has spent decades researching the city’s horticultural heritage, and her latest book reveals the remarkable story of Chicago’s first gardeners. Challenged by the region’s clay soil and harsh winters, Midwestern pioneers were forced to find imaginative uses for prairie plants, pounding salsify into gravy and grinding grain into coffee. Innovative nurserymen and florists would later develop a market for local fruit and flowers, in part by naming their varieties after Chicago’s well-known: the Mrs. Potter Palmer Carnation, for example, as well as the well-grown: the Bridgeport Chicago Drumhead Cabbage, in honor of the neighborhood’s Irish inhabitants. Gardening was no longer simply a way to fill one’s belly, but also a way to line one’s pockets. By the late 1880’s, Chicago had become the nation’s produce hub.

Today, Chicago earns the limelight as a leader in “green” cities. Chicago Gardens unveils a tradition of horticultural innovation—a story too long hidden under a bushel basket.

Read the press release.

Also see a special web feature for the book, five Chicago gardens.

July 15, 2008

Physics for sale?

In the July issue of Physics Today William H. Wing reviews Daniel S. Greenberg's recent book Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism—a revealing look at academic science and its commoditization in the hands of private interests. From the review:

Greenberg's research is extensive. His knowledge of the institutions, policymakers, and industries involved in the development of marketable science, and their effects on the science community and public policy, is vast.…
[But] many of Greenberg's examples pertain to the biomedical sciences. Some difficulties he describes—the complex ethical issues involved in human-subject research, extensive regulations, and massive documentation requirements—are issues that physical scientists rarely encounter. Thus those scientists may infer that the book is not relevant to them. They should not. Results in the physical sciences can have enormous human and societal impacts and can raise knotty moral problems, as history has shown. Science for Sale is a cautionary tale that should provoke thoughtful discussions among researchers and academic administrators.

Read the review on the Physics Today website.

May 01, 2008

Baboons in mind

Writing for the May 15 New York Review of Books A.C. Grayling begins his review of several books on primatology with a brief retrospective of the work of Dr. Jane Goodall. Along with several of her contemporaries—Grayling cites paleoanthropologist Louis Leaky, and zoologist Dian Fossey among others—Goodall's research on primate's social behavior helped to shed light on the connections between humanity and our nearest living ancestors. And since her groundbreaking study at Tanzania's Gombe National Park, many other scientists have continued in the same vein, gaining further insights into primates social lives and, in turn, giving us new and deeper insights into our own. As a worthy example Grayling cites Robert M. Seyfarth and Dorothy L. Cheney's most recent book Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. Grayling writes:

Baboon Metaphysics, by Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, shows how far ethology has come since Jane Goodall's early years at Gombe. An account of Cheney's and Seyfarth's field research into the social interactions of baboons, this is an impressive story, not just because of the care that went into the observations and experiments they record, but also in the philosophical sophistication of their thinking about the mental life of baboons.
Cheney and Seyfarth cite a remark from one of Darwin's notebooks as the starting point for their work: "He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke." By "baboon" Darwin undoubtedly meant the language, or at least the system of communication, of baboons, and by "metaphysics" he did not mean quite what this word now denotes (namely, inquiry into the fundamental nature of reality) but philosophy in general—especially ethics and the nature and sources of knowledge.… Reconstructing the intention of Darwin's remark, we see what he had in mind: now that religious explanations will no longer do, the significance and value of things human must be understood by placing mankind squarely in nature, and learning as much as possible from mankind's closest relatives about how we came to be what we are. Thus understood, Darwinian metaphysics is sociobiology as applied to human beings.

For Cheney and Seyfarth the implication of Darwin's dictum is that ethological study of monkeys and apes can yield clues to the nature of the mind.…

The review ends on a provocative note:

One thing is clear: whereas human self-importance once placed human beings outside nature, everything that has followed from research of the kind done by Jane Goodall and Cheney and Seyfarth makes it impossible to think in such terms any longer. This point should by now be a mere commonplace; yet there are many millions of people whose faith-based ways of viewing the world lead them to think otherwise.

Read the rest of the review on the New York Review of Books website.

April 24, 2008

Press Release: Calvin, Global Fever

The symptoms are all around us: rising temperatures, increasingly destructive storms, shrinking animal populations, creeping deserts. The earth is slowly dying, poisoned by too much carbon dioxide—and it’s high time we called a doctor. Enter popular science writer and journalist William Calvin, who with Global Fever delivers a grim diagnosis and outlines a radically thorough course of treatment. In stark, straightforward language, Calvin warns us of the mortal danger we face from unanticipated feedback loops as rising temperatures kill off plants and dry up water, leading to ever-faster warming. Every day we put off serious action, the situation becomes more desperate and our possible solutions narrow. If we hope to avoid climate disaster and the scarcely imaginable social upheaval that would accompany it, Calvin argues that we must commit to an aggressive, worldwide effort to switch to clean technologies—from hot rock geothermal power to air-fueled cars—essentially jumpstarting what would amount to a new, green, industrial revolution. The time for half-measures is over; Global Fever is a blueprint for real, comprehensive action.

Read the press release.

April 23, 2008

Press Release: Bloomfield, The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science

Last year’s report from the National Science Foundation dolefully confirmed what many researchers have suspected for years: while the number of PhD graduates in the sciences continues to increase, tenure-track positions have remained static since the early 1980s. And after spending years in the post-doc trenches, this glut of PhDs is enough to make many would-be scientists wonder about their next steps.

As the founders of their university’s first office for postdoctoral affairs, Victor A. Bloomfield and Esam E. El-Fakahany have first-hand experience with the challenges young scientists face. Together, they’ve mentored thousands of students, and now they’ve combined that experience in teaching, counseling, and research to create The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science. From preparing a CV and resume, to writing grants and scientific papers, to networking with fellow scientists, The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science truly is a “toolkit” for aspiring scientists—helping them not just cope but excel at this critical phase in their careers.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Education | Press Releases
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April 22, 2008

Press Release: Greenberg, Of Prairie, Woods and Water

Chicago literature is rife with images of industry and unbridled urban growth. But the tallgrass prairie and dense oak forests that once comprised Chicago’s landscape also inspired local writers. In Of Prairie, Woods, and Water, naturalist Joel Greenberg gathers these voices from the land to present an unexpected portrait of Chicago. Often charming, sometimes heart-wrenching, this anthology of Chicago-area nature writing is scheduled for release on April 22nd—just in time for Earth Day.

Of Prairie, Woods, and Water tells the story of a land in transition, one with abundant, unique, and incredibly lush flora and fauna—a natural history that is quite elusive today. From the journal of a frustrated pioneer who staked a claim in Kankakee marsh to Theodore Drieser’s plea for conservation of the Tippecanoe River, the sources included are as diverse as the nature they describe. Together, they traverse a wide area of the Midwest, from the Illinois River to the Indiana Dunes.

This spring and summer, a series of performances called “Voices from the Land” will bring Of Prairie, Woods, and Water to life. The premiere performance takes place at the Garfield Farm Museum on April 27. For more on this event and others at the Chicago Botanic Garden and the Lincoln Park Zoo, please visit www.press.uchicago.edu/News/ontheroad.html.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Chicago | Press Releases
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April 08, 2008

Good soil = healthy plants

The Chicago Tribune ran an article recently featuring James B. Nardi's Life in the Soil: A Guide for Naturalists and Gardeners that gives some great advice on cultivating a bumper crop in your garden this spring. Writing for the Tribune Beth Botts' article begins:

The part of the garden we love is above ground: flowers, leaves, stems, branches, bark, birds, squirrels. But that part can't thrive without the part we hardly notice except when we dig.
James Nardi, an entomologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is so fascinated by that part of the garden that he wrote a field guide to it: Life in the Soil: A Guide for Naturalists and Gardeners.

Some of the organisms he describes break down dead plant matter and release its nutrients to be absorbed by the roots of living plants. Others help make roots more efficient. Some improve the texture of the soil so plant roots can get air and water. And some eat others, maintaining the population balance that keeps the whole underground society—what scientists call the soil food web—humming along.

The article continues citing the best kinds of soils ("loam, with at least two sizes of mineral particles") and what readers can do to help the underground ecosystems in their gardens thrive (compost).

Check out the full article on the Chicago Tribune website.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News
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March 05, 2008

Review, Bliss: The Discovery of Insulin

Writing for the February 28 New England Journal of Medicine Dr. Chris Feudtner reviews our new edition of Michael Bliss's The Discovery of Insulin, a fascinating account of the struggle of four Canadian scientists—Frederick Banting, J.J.R. Macleod, Charles Best, and J.B. Collip—to make one of the most important medical discoveries of the modern age. Feudtner writes:

During the past century, medical science has produced numerous remarkable therapeutic achievements, but few accomplishments can rival—in terms of importance or drama—the development of insulin in 1921 and 1922.…
Twenty-five years ago, the historian Michael Bliss composed his remarkably illuminating recounting of this saga. It has proved to be the definitive account. Bliss, now a university professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, has also written highly regarded biographies of the inimitable physician Sir William Osler, the polymath surgeon Harvey Cushing, and the fascinating, albeit mercurial, Banting. But as Bliss confides, "The Discovery of Insulin is my favourite," and the book has now been released in a 25th anniversary edition, with a new preface and an updated concluding chapter.

You can find the full text of the review on the New England Journal of Medicine website, or find out more about the book here.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
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March 04, 2008

Review: Greeenberg, Science for Sale

jacket image

Daniel S. Greenberg's Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism has already generated much interest in the U. S. where the effect of the marketplace on academic science has been news for quite some time. But last Friday London's Physics Today ran a positive review of Greenberg's insightful analysis of campus capitalism as well, noting the book's applicability to science policy in the UK. Greg Parker writes for Physics Today:

When I joined the University of Southampton's microelectronics group in 1987 after spending 10 years in industry, I shared some of my commercial ideas for advancing the group into the 21st century with my academic colleagues. To say that my personal vision of paradise was close to their vision of hell is probably a pretty accurate observation. Two decades on, I now understand why they felt that way. Science for Sale contains a lot of information that explains this vast difference in perception, and the book also does a good job of highlighting how academia and industry differ on practical and ethical levels.

Parker continues:

My first worry on picking up the book was that it would be almost totally inapplicable to the current situation in the UK. Daniel Greenberg is a US journalist who usually writes about American science policy and practice, so I was expecting to find very little overlap with the reality of academic and business life in the UK. Much to my surprise, however, the overlap was almost 100%…
[T]his book does an excellent job of listing in detail the problems and the successes of trying to link the industrial world with academia.…

February 26, 2008

Citrus is a serious matter

In a review appearing in last Sunday's edition of the Toronto Star Christine Sisimondo begins:

In academia, generally, food writing is relegated to… 'the kind of thing you might find in a newspaper'—not in the hallowed halls of higher ed.… But of late, "that's been changing. Anthropology and environmental science departments are beginning to redefine the study of food, as not just about nutrition and shortages through the ages but as a serious cultural indicator.

Sisimondo uses Pierre Laszlo's new book Citrus: A History to demonstrate her point:

Laszlo is a chemistry professor who is probably best known for his previous book, Salt: Grain of Life, and has now moved on to one of the next great essential staples, citrus.
Laszlo has a truly charming way of telling the story, weaving his personal biography into the tale of the migration of various fruits around the world.

He is careful, though (and tells us he is worried about overstepping his bounds), to never let the personal overshadow the story of lemons, limes, grapefruits, oranges and, of course, such exotics as ugli fruit, kumquats and yuzu.…

[And] while there's … plenty of great history in Laszlo's account, it's [also] interdisciplinary, adding to his personal tale and all that lore discussions on chemistry and three great chapters on the symbolic meanings of citrus and the image of these fruits in poetry and art.

Laszlo proves that citrus is a serious matter, worthy of real academic study.

Read the rest of the article on the Toronto Star website. Also read six citrus recipies from the book.

February 19, 2008

Histories of citrus and time

Writing for this month's edition of Natural History magazine Laurence A. Marschall reviews two recent books in the history of science: Pierre Laszlo's exploration of the cultural and culinary phenomenon of citrus fruit in Citrus: A History, and Pascal Richet's historical account of the various ways humans have attempted to record the age of the earth in A Natural History of Time.

Marschall writes of Citrus:

Can one describe a work of nonfiction as being happy? Well, this one is. Pierre Laszlo, a retired chemistry professor turned science writer, has approached the lore of citrus fruit with the élan of a master chef (the man is French, after all), mixing history, economics, biology, and chemistry to produce a book that will bring a smile to readers of every taste. Until reading Citrus, in fact, I had not realized just how many tastes the title implied: lemon, lime, orange, and grapefruit, of course, but also citron, tangerine, kumquat, calamondin, and the self-descriptive Ugli, not to mention such variants as bergamot, mandarin, Valencia, ortanique, and Honey Murcott. Laszlo's literary method is to present them as characters in an unfolding story. He begins with the domestication of the citron in Persia and the early history of citrus horticulture, then moves to the establishment and growth of the citrus industry in Florida, California, and Brazil, and finally, after many diversions and digressions, arrives at a final section that explores the place of citrus in literature, art, religion, and the culture of cuisine.

And the praise continues for Richet's A Natural History of Time:

Looking at the sandy New England pond outside our summer house, I can readily imagine the glacial remnant that lay there some 12,000 years ago, melting in the warming rays of the Holocene sun. I know, too, that a few hundred million years ago, before continental drift split us apart, Europe and this bit of North American real estate were joined. And I'm well aware that 5 billion years ago, this sand and this water, indeed the Earth itself and everything on it, were part of an interstellar cloud that was condensing into our solar system. Deep time is just one of those things I take for granted.
But as geophysicist Pascal Richet demonstrates in this readable popular history of chronology, the geologic calendar implicit in today's view of nature was not shared by earlier generations. Written accounts from ancient civilizations depict prehistory as a foggy dreamtime. Most authors made little attempt to assign dates or durations other than “in the beginning.…”

Only the fine details of the Earth's timeline are matters of contention any more.… Yet precisely because the current well-grounded chronology seems so natural to most scientifically literate people, Richet's authoritative review of Earth's history is particularly welcome. Rather than fret about polls that show how many citizens still hold to the chronology of the Holy Book, he invites us to marvel at the efforts of science to read the book of nature itself.

Read both reviews on the Natural History magazine website. Also navigate to our special Citrus web page featuring six tasty citrus recipes.

February 12, 2008

Review: Owen, On the Nature of Limbs

This month's issue of the journal Nature is running a nice review of Richard Owen's nineteenth century treatise on biological forms On the Nature of Limbs—one of the foundational works contributing to the development of modern evolutionary theory—newly reprinted in a facsimile edition edited by Ronald Amundson. Michael Coates writes for Nature:

A decade before Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Owen very nearly sketched a theory of evolutionary transformation, fragments of which appear here. However, as Padian describes, such were the sociopolitical and philosophical strains on Owen's position that he stalled at the final intellectual leap. Owen's patrons were of the Oxbridge-educated establishment—adherents to the natural theology of the 'argument from design' (for the existence of God) as advocated most influentially by William Paley (now sadly repackaged with a molecular gloss by the proponents of 'intelligent design').… But it remains an excellent source for those interested in how we identify and interpret pattern in nature. A dissertation on similarity, conservation and variability in form, it addresses issues of enduring interest to systematic biologists as well as to the revitalized field of evolutionary developmental biology.…
Read the rest of the review on the Nature website.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
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February 07, 2008

Backyard biology

The Anchorage Daily News is currently running a great review of James B. Nardi's new book, Life in the Soil: A Guide for Naturalists and Gardeners. Jeff Lowenfels author of another recent gardner's guide to the ecosystem, writes:

Consider this column a strong recommendation to go out and get this book, not from the library but from a store. It is well worth owning. Not only did I find it a great read, but it is a reference book I will turn to often.…
Nardi is a skilled scientific illustrator as well as a biologist. Almost every page has a detailed picture of the organisms (with size reference) he is describing, often showing not only the animal but its habitat, including those it eats or those that eat it. You will surely recognize animals you have seen before but were not able to identify.…

Birders have their Petersons and Sibleys. There are guides to snakes, butterflies, mammals and all sorts of other natural things. Now we gardeners have a guide to the critters that make up the soil food web.

Read the rest of the review on the Anchorage Daily News website.

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January 25, 2008

From Chlorophyll to Carbon Dating

Two recently published science books were reviewed earlier this week in the January 19 edition of the UK daily, the Guardian. The longer of the two reviews gives a nice synopsis of David Lee's new book, Nature's Palette: The Science of Plant Color:

Ceaseless activity hums through David Lee's book, which is about the chemicals and light-bending growth-layers that plants produce; zillions of minute brews of organic dyes allow preferred wavelengths in the visible spectrum of solar radiation to pass through them, strike the plant tissues, be scattered and reflected back as colours…
Once you've followed him through a basic course… in molecular chemistry, plant biology and optic operations, he gets to wondering exactly what job the colours and patterns do in and for each growth. The leafy stuff is easy—chlorophyll absorbs all of the visible wavelengths, except green, to turn light energy to chemical energy as sugar through photosynthesis.… [But] beyond green chlorophyll [Lee explores] the other great chemical families—the yellow-orange carotenoids and the pink-red flavonoids, especially the anthocyanins—and a swatch of minor concoctions, including indigo indoles, and quinone methides that redden the hearts of rosewood and sandalwood.

Read the rest of the article or navigate to our website to find out more about the book.

The Guardian also ran a shorter piece on Pascal Richet's A Natural History of Time. Steven Poole writes for the Guardian:

What is time? How much of it has there been? This magisterial history begins with ancient myth, passing through Genesis, the Greeks, Arabic mathematics, and then European science through the centuries. The central question pursued by its protagonists is that of the age of the Earth. How to measure it? Count the generations in the Old Testament; count strata of rock or fossils; count how much salt there is in the sea; count how much time it would take for a large body to cool down; count how much uranium has decayed into lead. At last, in the 1950s, we arrive at a reliable age for the Earth of about 4.55 billion years.…
The book is gorgeously written, finding almost as much beauty in wrong theories as right ones; and Pascal Richet (himself a geophysicist) pays highly sympathetic attention to the subjects of his numerous thumbnail biographies.

Read the rest of the review.

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January 22, 2008

Monkey Politics

Today's New York Times is running an article titled "Political Animals," comparing the current presidential candidates election politics to the complex social dynamics found in other species like elephants, whales, and rhesus macaques—the latter of which are the subject of Dario Maestripieri's new book Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World. In the article, the NYT's Natalie Angier cites Maestripieri's book as she compares the political behavior of these prolific primates to our own:

As the candidates have shown us in the succulent telenovela that is the 2008 presidential race, there are many ways to parry for political power.… [And] just as there are myriad strategies open to the human political animal with White House ambitions, so there are a number of nonhuman animals that behave like textbook politicians.…
As Dr. Maestripieri sees it, rhesus monkeys embody the concept "Machiavellian" (and he accordingly named his recent popular book about the macaques Macachiavellian Intelligence).

"Individuals don't fight for food, space or resources," Dr. Maestripieri explained. "They fight for power." With power and status, he added, "they'll have control over everything else.…"

"Rhesus males are quintessential opportunists," Dr. Maestripieri said. "They pretend they're helping others, but they only help adults, not infants. They only help those who are higher in rank than they are, not lower. They intervene in fights where they know they're going to win anyway and where the risk of being injured is small."

We may not know whence humans are descended but as for politicians it's pretty clear, read the rest of the article here.

December 26, 2007

An embarrassing primate book

Last Saturday Michael Bywater had an interesting take on Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World by Dario Maestripieri in the Daily Telegraph:

Primate books are good for us. They remind us that we're primates, too. And the embarrassing primate books are best. Macachiavellian Intelligence is an excellently embarrassing primate book, and just the thing to make us blush and shuffle our feet.

How to write an embarrassing primate book? Focus on "the notorious 'weed monkey', the rhesus macaque."

Rhesus macaques, in short, are sods. They are despotic and nepotistic; their power structures are matrilineal. The males hang around sullenly, get into fights, emigrate to other groups, get into more fights and lead lives of violence and aggression which, as Maestripieri explains, is because they want raw power. Power gets you everything. It's worth the price.

Rhesus macaques are—after homo sapiens of course—the most successful primates on the planet, judged by population size and distribution. Is violence and aggression the reason for our success? Maestripieri's understanding of rhesus society has much to say to our own.

(Bywater also gives a passing mention to another book on primates, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind by Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth. We have an excerpt from that book.)

Archived in Biology | Reviews
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December 21, 2007

The life under the snow

"You don't have to travel to the Brazilian rain forest to luxuriate in the biodiversity at our feet," says Adrian Higgins in a Washington Post review of James B. Nardi's Life in the Soil: A Guide for Naturalists and Gardeners. Even now, under that blanket of snow outside the window, a veritable holiday feast is underway: "organisms that can be seen by us, such as wood lice, and those that cannot, such as bacteria, set into motion a hidden, primal banquet featuring hordes of revelers and many courses."

It's the first day of winter and life in the soil is teeming. "We as a species," says Higgins, "have been largely ignorant of this universe for so long." Nardi's book "is a must-read for anyone who wants a better understanding of this world and how to protect it." Even creatures grubby and small.

Archived in Biology | Reviews
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December 14, 2007

Science and money

An interesting review of Daniel S. Greenberg's Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism is currently running in the January-February issue of the American Scientist. Reviewer Robert L. Geiger praises Greenberg's book for its lucid and balanced look at the influence of corporate funding on American academic institutions:

[In] Science for Sale, [Greenberg] ventures outside the Beltway to scrutinize the state of academic science and its supposed burgeoning ties with the corporate world. Although the somewhat fraught title would seem to place this work with an abundance of books condemning university ties with industry, Greenberg has provided a more nuanced analysis and offers some different conclusions.…
He begins with an iconoclastic portrayal of corporate-sponsored research. Far from dominating or corrupting universities, it has been a marginal and (since 2000) shrinking portion of the research they conduct. Academic research has great value for industry, but companies prefer to let the government pay for it. "Not many corporations are besieging universities to take their money," Greenberg says. "Eagerness for even more business is strongest on the university side of the relationship." Moreover, he sees little scope for industry to take advantage of this hunger: "In the current era of heightened sensitivity to abuse of academic integrity, the risk of public opprobrium for offending accepted values is substantial." Given the predominance Greenberg ascribes to self-interested behavior, it is not surprising that he frequently alludes to the fear of institutional embarrassment or individual ruin as the force driving ethical behavior. However, when he returns to this theme in his conclusion, he emphasizes the growing effectiveness of the systems now in place to police and punish scientific misconduct.

The review concludes:

Overall… Greenberg has provided an important assessment of the state of academic science. He finds that public doubts about the integrity of the research enterprise are probably overdone: "Science is in good shape, productive and socially beneficial," he says. "The negative elements," he believes, "pose a more complicated, less measurable story." But Greenberg's account makes it clear that those negative elements are concentrated in the biomedical borderlands, where vigilance in the enforcement of ethical standards is indeed called for.

Read the full review on the American Scientist website.

December 10, 2007

Baboon Metaphysics on Fresh Air

Primatologists Dorothy Cheney and Richard Seyfarth, authors of the new book Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind were featured last week on NPR's Fresh Air to discuss their years of research in Botswana's Okavango Delta observing baboons and their social world. The results of their studies, available in their book, reveal the surprising complexities of baboon society and the fascinating intelligence that underlies it—and indeed may even give us some valuable insights into our own social behaviors. You can listen to archived audio of the interview online at the NPR website or read an excerpt from the book.

November 29, 2007

'Tis the season to drink your orange juice

Pierre Laszlo's new book Citrus: A History has been featured in several articles this month, one in the November 22 issue of Nature and another in the November 25 issue of the UK's Sunday Times. Both articles praise Laszlo's book for its comprehensive historical account of the propagation of citrus fruits around the globe and both note that one of the most important reasons for its popularity is its medicinal value—an especially pertinent fact to keep in mind during these long winter months. From the Sunday Times:

[In Citrus] Laszlo, a retired French chemist, takes us on a journey from the orangeries of Versailles, via the limes of the Royal Navy to the citriculture of modern Florida. It was only in the 1920s, he tells us, that orange juice became "an integral part of the American breakfast", after the great flu epidemic of 1918-19. Laszlo shows that the citrus fruit "is a treasure trove of chemicals that are highly useful to humankind"—which also happens to taste wonderful.

And on a similar note from Nature magazine:

Citrus provides a colorful background of the literature, poetry and art associated with citrus fruits, as well as their pharmaceutical effects. Apparently, an ingredient of grapefruit juice deactivates an enzyme in the small intestine that destroys some medications before they can enter the bloodstream. Alternatively, the citrus component boosts the activity of certain drugs, such as sildenafil (better known as Viagra) and inhibitors of HIV-1 proteases.

You can read the rest of both articles online, or navigate to our special Citrus website where you can find out more about the book as well as download six tasty—not to mention healthy—citrus recipes.

Press Release: Maestripieri, Macachiavellian Intelligence

Power. Sex. Status. That's pretty much what human life boils down to: a vicious, grasping struggle to get ahead and stay there. We look out for number one, claw for every advantage, and aren't above using—and even betraying—friends and family to get what we want. So just what is it that separates us from the higher primates? Dario Maestripieri would argue that it's less than you may think, and with Macachiavellian Intelligence he draws readers deep into the social life of the world's most common monkey, the rhesus macaque, to show just how much we can learn from them about human life.

Writing with a biting, sardonic wit, Maestripieri draws on primatology, evolutionary biology, economics, politics, and literature to present a wry, rational, and wholly surprising view of our humanity as seen through the monkey in the mirror.

Read the press release.

November 14, 2007

Review: Greenberg, Science for Sale

Daniel S. Greenberg's Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism received a positive review in this month's BBC Focus magazine. Greenberg's book is a detailed study of the relationship between academia and the commercial sector—a relationship which some critics argue has corrupted the quality of academic inquiry, especially in the sciences. But as reviewer Steve Fuller notes, Greenberg's penetrating new book reveals that campus capitalism might, in fact, not be as nearly as bad as commonly thought. Fuller writes:

Greenberg's story is framed by the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act by the US Congress in 1980, which allowed universities and other non-profit institutions to seek intellectual property rights without seeking prior government approval.… The nation as a whole would presumably benefit from the commercial availability of such privately protected science.
However this 'neo-liberal' turn in US science policy has led to a host of allegations. These range from big business trying to buy large biomedical science departments to a breakdown in the peer review process through undetected cases of research fraud. Greenberg's verdict is that while such cases do exist, their rarity is even more striking.

Greenberg provocatively argues that overblown claims about the capitalist corruption of academia may turn out to be self-defeating. Universities already provide an array of free or low-cost service for business, from training potential employees to researching potentially lucrative fields. Moreover such activities are bound to increase in the coming years. In that case, it might be in academia's own interest to cultivate more explicit ties with the commercial sector, if only to ensure that business pays its own way.

Press Release: Hedman, The Age of Everything

The age of the earth—as well as the age of the stars and the universe—is the subject of great debate. Young Earth Creationists, citing biblical evidence, believe the Earth is between six thousand and 10,000 years old. Scientists, on the other hand, estimate the solar system is much older, around 4.5 billion years. But how do scientists determine the ages of things, especially those which formed so long before human history?

In The Age of Everything, Matthew Hedman lays bare the tricks of the scientist’s trade, revealing how archeologists, biologists, geologists, physicists, astronomers, and cosmologists all reconstruct the distant past. Explaining how scientific inquiry has determined everything from the dates of climate changes to human migration patterns to the age of the universe, The Age of Everything covers a wide range of timescales, from the relatively recent reign of the Mayans to the far-distant birth of stars. A provocative and far-ranging look at the power of modern science to put us in touch with the ancient past, The Age of Everything will be indispensable for anyone with an interest in popular science—and time travel.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | History | Press Releases
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November 06, 2007

Why do we drink orange juice?

In an article appearing in the "Burning Questions" column in today's edition of Newsday Erica Marcus cites Pierre Laszlo's new book Citrus: A History to help her answer one reader's burning question about the origins of orange juice. From Newsday:

I can't drink cold orange juice first thing in the morning, but I am curious as to when and where this practice began. I don't think it's European. —Rhoda Greenberg, Islip
Drinking orange juice at breakfast is indeed a peculiarly American custom, one whose story recalls those quintessentially American values: marketing and technological innovation.

In his just-published book, Citrus: A History, retired chemistry professor Pierre Laszlo recounts the providential hook-up of the California Fruit Growers Exchange (an organization that was later to become Sunkist) with advertising copywriter Albert D. Lasker.

In the early years of the 20th century, oranges were consumed principally as fresh, whole fruit. In 1916, when California growers were stuck with an overabundance of oranges, Lasker came up with the slogan: "Drink an orange." This, according to Laszlo, was the moment at which juice consumption began to outstrip fruit consumption.

Read the rest of the article on the Newsday website. Also, see our special Citrus site that includes six tasty citrus recipes from Laszlo's book.

November 05, 2007

Press Release: Meldahl, Hard Road West

The discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1849 triggered the largest overland migration in the world since the Crusades. Overnight, it seemed like everyone was heading west. Though they knew next to nothing about what they’d find along the way, or even at their destination, thousands of families piled their belongings onto wagons and set out, dazzled by visions of a life of wealth and ease.

As Keith Meldahl recounts in Hard Road West, it didn’t take long before the trail disabused the settlers of those notions. Drawing heavily on the diaries and letters of the emigrants, Meldahl reveals their astonishment at their first encounters with the harsh, breathtaking Western landscape, so much less hospitable than the Eastern forests or Midwestern prairies. Meldahl marries that historical and personal perspective to the equally dramatic underlying story of the geology of the West, peeling back the layers of sediment and history to show how centuries of geological activity had a direct effect on the routes taken by the travelers—and the resources and aid available to them along the way.

Read the press release or an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Biology | History | Press Releases
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October 31, 2007

Review: Lee, Nature's Palette

The colorful splendor of flora has been a perennial a source of human interest and inspiration, (if you're in Chicago just take a look out your window), yet while many can appreciate plant color aesthetically, few of us are aware of the science behind it. Now, with David Lee's forthcoming book, Nature's Palette: The Science of Plant Color, the fascinating story of how and why plants exhibit the brilliant colors they do is revealed. In a recent piece appearing in the October 25 edition of Nature reviewer Philip Ball writes:

"Why grass is green, or why our blood is red, Are mysteries which none have reach'd into." John Donne's words were true in the seventeenth century. Today they certainly aren't, as David Lee makes clear in Nature's Palette, an enchanting survey of color in plants.…

Ball's review continues:

Lee's book is packed with many… gems from botanical and social history. So captivating is his passion for botany that his occasionally bewildering thickets of carotenes and anthocyanins can be forgiven. His paean provides a compelling case that botany is full of intellectual challenges, many shamefully neglected.

Read the rest of the review currently available online at the Nature website.

Archived in Biology | Reviews
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October 23, 2007

Review: Maestripieri, Macachiavellian Intelligence

The Times Higher Education Supplement recently ran a positive review of Dario Maestripieri's new book, Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World. A detailed examination of how rhesus macaques have come to claim the title of the world's most prolific primates (after homo-sapiens, of course) Macachiavellian Intelligence delivers an insightful exploration of macaque social organization—revealing relationships perpetually subject to the cruel laws of the markets and power struggles that would impress Machiavelli himself.

Alison Jolly's review for the THES begins:

If this review were written by a rhesus monkey, the author would get an O mouth threat and a clear chance of being bitten. Unless, of course, the author were dominant to the reviewer, in which case it would be a sycophantic fear grin in hopes of payoff—either promotion or sex. The only actual altruists in rhesus society are mothers, but The Times Higher doesn't ask authors' mothers to review books.…

The review continues:

Maestripieri tells [his] story with incisive prose, sharp wit and admirable brevity, and the book should appeal to a wide audience from cynical teenagers to economists who believe that the "invisible hand" of competition underlies all human society. He also has perfect timing. The idea that our human brains evolved largely to deal with the demands of society is very much in fashion.…
Rhesus range from India to China, through Himalayan snows, tropical swamps, temples, bazaars and railway stations. Humans, of course, range everywhere. The sweeter-natured primates… have more restricted ranges than nastier ones. Does this mean that there is a correlation between aggression and success in the world? Maestripieri thinks so. He compares rhesus society to the army—organized to conquer people and occupy lands.

N.B. See the press's translations of Machiavelli's works including Art of War and The Prince.

October 15, 2007

Review: Laszlo, Citrus

Citrus: A History, the latest from chemist and author Pierre Laszlo, is a fascinating historical study of the culinary and cultural phenomenon of the citrus. Writing for the UK's Financial Times, Ian Irvine's recent review delivers a succinct and enthusiastic summary of Laszlo's new work:

Pierre Laszlo's short but brilliant book ranges over citrus's eventful history and describes its global importance in agriculture, industry, religion, painting, literature, nutrition and architecture. He also provides some excellent recipes.… Laszlo is a professor of chemistry and author of a fine history of salt. His scientific explanations—the fruit's importance as a source of vitamin C, for example—are excellent, but he is also equally lucid in other fields: the purpose of the orangery at the palace of Versailles; the role of the peeled lemon in Dutch still-lifes; and why the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles requires an etrog citron.

You can read the rest of Irvine's review online at the FT.com or check out six citrus recipes from Laszlo's book online at the UCP website.

Press Release: Nardi, Life in the Soil

The biological world under our toes is often unexplored and unappreciated, yet it teems with life. In one square meter of earth, there live trillions of bacteria, millions of nematodes, hundreds of thousands of mites, thousands of insects and worms, and hundreds of snails and slugs. But because of their location and size, many of these creatures are as unfamiliar and bizarre to us as anything found at the bottom of the ocean.

A unique and illustrative introduction to the many unheralded creatures that inhabit our soils and shape our environment aboveground, Life in the Soil covers everything from slime molds and roundworms to woodlice and dung beetles, as well as vertebrates from salamanders to shrews. Lavishly illustrated with nearly three hundred color illustrations and masterfully-rendered black and white drawings, Life in the Soil will inform and enrich the naturalist in all of us.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Press Releases
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Press Release: Greenberg, Science for Sale

The media are awash with stories about increasingly close ties between college science departments and multi-million dollar corporations, but is that relationship endangering science? Have universities, bedazzled by visions of huge profits from biotechnology and drug patents, allowed themselves to be fatally compromised by corporate cash?

With Science for Sale, journalist Daniel S. Greenberg draws on sources developed through his forty years of reporting to paint a clear and detailed picture of the state of university science. Taking on everything from drug tests to the technology transfer offices that have sprung up at many universities, Greenberg reveals that campus capitalism is more complicated—and less profitable—than media reports would suggest.

Read the press release.

October 09, 2007

Baboon Aristocrats?

The lead article in the "Science Times" section of today's New York Times focuses on Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert Seyfarth's new book Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. The article features a photo gallery of the Moremi Game Reserve in Botswana's Okavango Delta where Cheney and Seyfarth have been making some extraordinary observations of baboons in their social world, and offers some fascinating insights into their research. Reporter Nicholas Wade notes that Cheney and Seyfarth have gone a step beyond the many studies that have sought to simply parse our primate ancestor's social organization, and instead approach their subjects with the goal of fully understanding the cognitive mechanisms that underlie their social behaviors—in the hopes of gaining a better understanding of our own. Wade writes:

Reading a baboon's mind affords an excellent grasp of the dynamics of baboon society. But more than that, it bears on the evolution of the human mind and the nature of human existence. As Darwin jotted down in a notebook of 1838, "He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke."
Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth have summed up their new cycle of research in a book titled, after Darwin's comment, Baboon Metaphysics. Their conclusion, based on many painstaking experiments, is that baboons' minds are specialized for social interaction, for understanding the structure of their complex society and for navigating their way within it.

"Monkey society is governed by the same two general rules that governed the behavior of women in so many 19th-century novels," Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth write. "Stay loyal to your relatives (though perhaps at a distance, if they are an impediment), but also try to ingratiate yourself with the members of high-ranking families.…"

Baboon society revolves around mother-daughter lines of descent. Eight or nine matrilines are in a troop, each with a rank order. This hierarchy can remain stable for generations… [because] rank among female baboons is hereditary, with a daughter assuming her mother's rank.

News of that fact gave great satisfaction to a member of the British royal family, Princess Michael of Kent. She visited Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth in Botswana, remarking to them, they report: "I always knew that when people who aren't like us claim that hereditary rank is not part of human nature, they must be wrong. Now you've given me evolutionary proof!"

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Biology | Reviews
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October 01, 2007

Press Release: Lambin, The Middle Path

Concise and accessible, The Middle Path: Avoiding Environmental Catastrophe lays out the current state of research into climate change and considers what must be done if environmental catastrophe is to be avoided. Lambin takes a remarkably balanced approach, free of ideological prejudice, and the result is a surprisingly optimistic take on our prospects. Large-scale systems like the earth’s environment naturally tend toward equilibrium, and Lambin presents a batch of solutions, both global and local, that exploit that tendency. Taken together, they give humanity a real shot at averting this potentially fatal crisis.

Read the press release. Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Biology | Press Releases
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August 20, 2007

Review: Harmon and Gross, The Scientific Literature

Last week's edition of Nature carried an interesting review of Joseph E. Harmon and Alan G. Gross's The Scientific Literature: A Guided Tour. As Nature's Steven Shapin explains, Harmon and Gross's fascinating new book delivers a unique historical account of scientific knowledge that focuses not on the facts, but the various rhetorical strategies scientists have used to report them:

Today, few scientists consider themselves to be rhetoricians. How many even know the meaning of anaphora, antimetabole or litotes?
But it's not that simple. The scientific literature reports, but it also aims to persuade readers that what it reports is reliable and significant. And the arts of persuasion are inevitably literary and, specifically, rhetorical. It is an arduously learned skill to write in the way that Nature deems acceptable. Conventions of scientific writing have changed enormously over the past few centuries and even over recent decades. The very big differences between Jane Austen's Persuasion and a scientific paper lie in the different patterns of rhetoric used in the latter, not in their absence from it.

There are now many historical and sociological studies of scientific communication. Joseph Harmon and Alan Gross's book, The Scientific Literature, is something different—neither a research monograph on the history of scientific writing nor a straightforward compilation of excerpts. Originating from an exhibition held at the University of Chicago in 2000, it includes about 125 examples of scientific writing taken from papers, books, reviews and Nobel speeches, and covers material from the seventeenth century up to the announcement of the rough draft of the human genome in 2001.

A comprehensive anthology, The Scientific Literature is an essential contribution to our understanding of modern scientific knowledge.

Archived in Biology | History | Reviews
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August 09, 2007

Review: Richet, A Natural History of Time

Last Sunday the Los Angeles Times ran an interesting review of Pascal Richet's new book, A Natural History of Time. Applauding some of the many rich details included in this fascinating story of mankind's endeavors to construct a chronology, Times review editor Sara Lippincott writes:

[Richet] begins with early myths, stories humans told themselves to make sense of their world. These myths were "outside of time," he writes, "because nature, above all, is governed by cycles" and "neither beginning nor end can be discerned." The Egyptians, for example, counted years in cycles, starting with each new reign. Speaking of the Egyptians, one of the entrancing nuggets in this nugget-studded book is the information that their hours "varied in duration according to the length of the day." We owe the stable, 60-minute hour to the Greeks, via "the sexagesimal notation of the Mesopotamians."

From the ancient Egyptian calendar to modern radiometric dating, Richet's book delivers an eye-opening exploration of the history of man's quest for time, giving us a chance to truly appreciate how far our knowledge—and our planet—have come.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
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August 08, 2007

Review: Cheney and Seyfarth, Baboon Metaphysics

The August 2 edition of Nature features a review of Dorothy L. Cheney and Richard Seyfarth's recent book Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. The review focuses on the author's detailed examination of Baboon's complex social behavior—the results of years of research in Botswana's Okavango Delta—and their trenchant exploration of the perennial question of nature vs. nurture. Asif A. Ghazanfar writes for Nature:

In Baboon Metaphysics, Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth explain that our social reflexes evolved from our group-living primate ancestors. They explore what sort of intelligence is required to navigate the intricate social landscape that baboons live in. Is it based on a complex calculation, a system of innate rules that are applied to specific contexts? Or is it based on simple, implicit rules governed solely by learned associations?… This tension pervades this wonderful book on the social intelligence of non-human primates and what they might tell us about the evolution of the human mind.…
[The author's] enthusiasm is obvious, and their knowledge is vast and expressed with great clarity. All this makes Baboon Metaphysics a captivating read. It will get you thinking—and maybe spur you to travel to Africa to see it all for yourself.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Anthropology | Biology | Reviews
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July 30, 2007

Press Release: Richet, A Natural History of Time

As creatures of finite lifespan, capable of both learning about the past and imagining the future, humans are naturally fascinated with the concept of time. Questions of the origins of the earth, the universe, and humanity have been perpetual preoccupations, eliciting some of humanity's most trenchant thought—and most heated debates. With A Natural History of Time, Pascal Richet tells the fascinating story of attempts over centuries to determine the age of the earth. Featuring such luminaries as Hesiod, Leonardo, Descartes, and Newton, A Natural History of Time marries the pleasures of history to the drama of scientific discovery, giving readers a chance to marvel at just how far our knowledge—and our planet—have come.

Read the press release.

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July 18, 2007

Review: McLaren, Impotence

The July 5 London Review of Books contains a great review of Angus McLaren's Impotence: A Cultural History penned by celebrity shrink Adam Phillips. Noting the significant cultural implications of McLaren's historical study of male sexual impotence Phillips writes:

Like most of the cures for impotence that Angus McLaren describes in his panoramic study, there was very little 'evidence' that they worked. And yet it was, and still is, difficult to staunch the flow of more or less magical solutions for the perennial problem. 'The market is flooded with various appliances which are guaranteed to be sure cures,' a progressive physician grumbled in 1912. 'It goes without saying that most of them are worthless frauds.' What has also gone without saying, McLaren shows, is that the untold history of impotence is a history of many things, most obviously of gender relations, but less obviously— and this is implicit in his book, rather than spelled out—of our will to believe. Impotence raises the question of what wanting to believe something is a solution to, as well as making us wonder what counts as a solution. Erection on demand is a strange cultural ideal but a persistent one, and it tells us a lot about what we want to be.

Read a special feature drawn from the book: "Two Millennia of Impotence Cures."

Archived in Biology | History | Reviews
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July 17, 2007

Claire Nouvian on the News Hour

The News Hour with Jim Lehrer ran a fascinating piece yesterday featuring author and deep sea explorer Claire Nouvian on her new book, The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss. Nouvian joins Spencer Michels along with a panel of researchers to discuss the many new species scientists are currently discovering in the deep ocean, and the new techniques that make their discoveries possible. On the News Hour website you can listen to a RealAudio podcast of the discussion, archived video of the show, or view a images of some of the fascinating creatures featured in Nouvian's book.

Combining the latest scientific discoveries with astonishing color imagery, The Deep takes readers on a voyage into the darkest realms of the ocean. Revealing nature's oddest and most mesmerizing creatures in crystalline detail, The Deep features more than two hundred color photographs of terrifying sea monsters, living fossils, and ethereal bioluminescent creatures, some photographed here for the very first time. Accompanying these breathtaking photographs are contributions from some of the world's most respected researchers that examine the biology of deep-sea organisms, the ecology of deep-sea habitats, and the history of deep-sea exploration.

See our special website for The Deep which includes a gallery of images and an interview with the author.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology
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June 28, 2007

Two "weird and wonderful" books

Better together: the June 21 edition of Nature magazine features a simultaneous review of two new books exploring the unusual and fascinating life that inhabits the earth's deep oceans. Reviewer Mark Schrope places Tony Koslow's The Silent Deep: The Discovery, Ecology, and Conservation of the Deep Sea side by side with Claire Nouvian's fascinating photo-voyage to the deep sea in The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss to show how these two complimentary volumes offer a profound and unusual look at the inhabitants of one of the darkest and most mysterious environments on earth. Schrope writes:

The 'vampire squid from hell', the fireworks jellyfishes and the pigbutt worm are just a few of the creatures of the deep sea that have remained unseen by all but a select few. Two new books offer complementary views of this strange expanse and its inhabitants.…
No photo collection could replicate a visit to their realm or the breadth of the diversity to be found there, but Claire Nouvian's The Deep, with more than 200 large-format photos, comes closer than any previous book. The Silent Deep, by deep-sea biologist Tony Koslow, is an excellent companion, with textbook depth on all aspects of deep-sea science and conservation.…

Collectively, these books offer a spectacular visual and cerebral introduction to the wonders of the abyss that could awaken many to the idea that, as Koslow puts it, exploration and protection of the deep sea "is one of the great scientific voyages of discovery, one that humankind has only just embarked upon."

Preview some of the images in Nouvian's The Deep on our Deep website.

Archived in Biology | Reviews
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June 25, 2007

Review: Richet, A Natural History of Time

Pascal Richet's new book, A Natural History of Time, explores the various ways that human societies have conceptualized the idea of time. By tracing the various attempts throughout the history of western civilization to pinpoint the age of the earth, Richet's book tells the story of how human societies have progressively built a chronological scale that has made it possible to reconstruct the history of nature itself. As a recent review in the New York Sun notes, Pascal's book pays special attention to the rise of the scientific method as the dominant paradigm for the creation of this chronology. Adam Kirsch writes for the New York Sun:

How old is the Earth? Mr. Richet sets out to explore humanity's attempts to answer this most perplexing of questions, which acted as a spur and a baffle to human ingenuity for 2,500 years. Before it could be solved, we needed to invent chemistry and geology, astronomy and physics—to isolate the elements, read the sedimentary record, understand the evolution of species, and chart the movement of the stars.…
Not only does A Natural History of Time shed light on key advances in the history of science, from the ancient Greeks to the X-ray, it reminds us of the real heroism and nobility of the scientific enterprise. Today, science and technology have advanced to such a point that we tend to think mainly about their dangers—nuclear weapons, global warming, cloning. Yet our lives are supported by an immense edifice of scientific ingenuity, which we seldom understand or even think about. Mr. Richet reminds us that each acre of the continent of modern science was won back from an ocean of ignorance, by the hard work and intellectual courage of individuals.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
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June 22, 2007

Press Release: Stafford, Echo Objects

Barbara Stafford is at the forefront of a growing movement that calls for the humanities to confront the brain's material realities. In Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images she argues that humanists should seize upon the exciting neuroscientific discoveries that are illuminating the underpinnings of cultural objects. In turn, she contends, brain scientists could enrich their investigations of mental activity by incorporating phenomenological considerations—particularly the intricate ways that images focus intentional behavior and allow us to feel thought.

As precise in her discussions of firing neurons as she is about the coordinating dynamics of image making, Stafford locates these major transdisciplinary issues at the intersection of art, science, philosophy, and technology. Ultimately, she makes an impassioned plea for a common purpose—for the acknowledgment that, at the most basic level, these separate projects belong to a single investigation.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Philosophy | Press Releases
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June 21, 2007

The poetry of the deep sea

We know that the books we publish inspire scholarship. But it is especially gratifying to see that our books can inspire creativity of a different sort. Poetry instructor Cassie Sparkman recently used photographs from Claire Nouvian's The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss to inspire her writing students at an Evanston summer arts camp. And judging by the output of these amazing young writers, inspire them it did! Sparkman posted her students’ work to the Evanston Arts Camp Poetry! blog.

See our website for the book if you want to be inspired yourself.

Archived in Biology | Commentary
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June 15, 2007

Press Release: Epstein, Inclusion

Equal parts medical drama, political chronicle, and ringing polemic, Inclusion tells the story of the movement for a more inclusive approach to medical research, from the struggles of advocacy groups in the 1980s to force researchers to diversify their subject pools to the current model, under which drug companies make bold assertions that group differences in society are encoded in our biology. While Epstein appreciates the hope that more inclusive practices offer to traditionally underserved groups, he argues forcefully that these practices can overshadow far more important social inequities and will only make a real difference if tied to a broad-based effort to address health disparities.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases | Sociology
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June 11, 2007

Robert Seyfarth on Radio Times

Robert Seyfarth, co-author of Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind was recently featured on WHYY Philadelphia 's Radio Times with host Marty Moss-Coane. According to the Radio Times website, Seyfarth draws from his new book to discuss how "baboons relate to each other and understand their place in the world as well as what can we learn from them about human behavior." Archived audio of the radio show is available via the WHYY Radio Times website.

In Baboon Metaphysics Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert Seyfarth aim to fully comprehend the intelligence that underlies baboon's social organization. How do baboons actually conceive of the world and their place in it? Using innovative field experiments, the authors test whether baboons understand kinship relations, how they make use of vocal communication, and how they manage the stress and dangers of life in the wild. They learn that for baboons, just as for humans, family and friends hold the key to mitigating the ill effects of grief, stress, and anxiety.

Written with a scientist's precision and a nature-lover's eye, Baboon Metaphysics gives us an unprecedented and compelling glimpse into the mind of another species.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology
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June 05, 2007

Press Release: Gosnell, Ice

More brittle than glass, at times stronger than steel, at other times flowing like molasses, ice covers 10 percent of the earth’s land and 7 percent of its oceans.

In Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance author Mariana Gosnell explores the history and uses of ice in all its complexity, grandeur, and significance. From the freezing of Pleasant Lake in New Hampshire to the breakup of a Vermont river at the onset of spring, from the frozen Antarctic landscape that emperor penguins inhabit to the cold, watery route bowhead whales take between Arctic ice floes, Gosnell examines icebergs, icicles, and frostbite; sea ice and permafrost; ice on Mars and in the rings of Saturn; and several new forms of ice developed in labs. A record of the scientific surprises, cultural magnitude, and everyday uses of frozen water, Ice is a sparkling illumination of a substance whose ebbs and flows over time have helped form the world we live in.

Read the press release.

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May 29, 2007

Review: Cheney and Seyfarth, Baboon Metaphysics

Dorothy Cheney and Richard Seyfarth's new book, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind, has received several notable reviews over the past month. Writing in the May 19 issue of New Scientist primatologist Frans de Waal notes the the author's insightful study of baboons' social organization, and the implications of their research in gaining a better understanding of our own human society. Steven Poole also reviewed the book for the May 12 issue of the Guardian noting the book's entertaining study of the often dramatic social lives of these primates. Poole writes:

What have years of observing wild baboons in Botswana taught the authors about [baboon's] social thinking and learning abilities? The vivid narrative is like a bush detective story, as the authors conduct ingenious experiments, setting up loudspeakers to play back prerecorded baboon calls (the baboons recognize individual voices, and act surprised if a sequence indicates a violation of rank), or lament the loss of their favorites to lions and leopards. The detail of how baboons keep track of the, er, grunting order is almost novelistic, as we track social peaks and troughs in their lives, and the authors' conclusions have intriguing implications for the evolution of language in humans.

Read an excerpt from the book.

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May 24, 2007

Deep Sea Doubleheader

The May 20th Boston Globe featured a review of not one, but two new books celebrating the "breathtaking diversity of life" inhabiting the earth's deep oceans. Reviewer Anthony Doerr writes:

Two new books from the University of Chicago should help forever banish the paradigm of the lifeless deep. Tony Koslow's The Silent Deep is an illustrated survey of deep-sea ecology, deeply informed by history and rendered in straightforward, careful prose. Claire Nouvian's The Deep is a big, glossy book of deep-water photographs, punctuated with short essays by 15 leading oceanographers. (Koslow has an essay in Nouvian's book. )
The two books present earth's biggest, strangest ecosystem with reverence and wonder. Koslow tells the stories of deep-sea pioneers like Wyville Thomson and William Beebe; tours us past hydrothermal vents, underwater mountains, and whale falls; and laments the destruction of deep-water habitats caused by mining, pollution, and bottom trawling.

Nouvian's The Deep features more than 200 color portraits of the planet's least-known creatures: sparkling pink octopi like floating lanterns; iridescent squid with corkscrew tails; predatory fish with hooded eyes and translucent teeth looming in the darkness. Some of these are the first-ever photographs of certain organisms. At least eight of the pictures feature animals so unknown that Nouvian's captions list them as "unidentified."

Exploring the unusual life in one of the darkest and most mysterious environments on earth, these complementary volumes definitely make for some very cool summer reading.

See our special website to preview some of the astonishing color images from The Deep and read an interview with the author.

Archived in Biology | Reviews
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May 23, 2007

Press Release: Cheney and Seyfarth, Baboon Metaphysics

Watching primates at zoos is so fascinating because they seem to relate to one another as individuals; we see in their actions and vocalizations signs of friendship, rivalry, and even love. But how much of what we see is just our anthropomorphizing? How do primates really understand their relationships and their place in the world? The fruit of fifteen years living with baboons in their native habitat, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind answers these questions and more, showing us how baboons understand themselves and their world. The drama of rank and kinship, the authors reveal, would be right at home in Jane Austen, as the baboons make and break alliances with friends, relatives, and rivals. Through unprecedented field experiments, Cheney and Seyfarth enable us to understand the intelligence underlying these bonds and the forms of communications baboons employ to manage their relationships—and the dangers and stress of living in the wild. Baboon Metaphysics gives us an unprecedented and compelling glimpse into the mind of this most fascinating species.

Read the press release. Read an excerpt from the book.

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May 22, 2007

Review: Nouvian, The Deep

Claire Nouvian's The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss has been making waves in the media lately with reviews in Discover Magazine, the BBC's Focus Magazine, and the Literary Review among others. But this morning's piece in the New York Times probably weighs in as the book's best review yet. The science section of the May 22 edition features an enthusiastic review of Nouvian's fascinating illustrated journey into the abyss, complete with an interactive slide show featuring a sampling of the often beautiful—and sometimes scary—images that grace the pages of her new book. Reviewer William J. Broad writes for the NYT:

In [the book's] preface, Ms. Nouvian writes of an epiphany that began her undersea journey.
"It was as though a veil had been lifted," she says, "revealing unexpected points of view, vaster and more promising."

The photographs she has selected celebrate that sense of the unexpected. Bizarre species from as far down as four and half miles are shown in remarkable detail, their tentacles lashing, eyes bulging, lights flashing. The eerie translucence of many of the gelatinous creatures seems to defy common sense. They seem to be living water.

On page after page, it is as if aliens had descended from another world to amaze and delight. A small octopus looks like a child's squeeze toy. A seadevil looks like something out of a bad dream. A Ping-Pong tree sponge rivals artwork that might be seen in an upscale gallery.

The review also notes the "essays by some of the world's top experts on deep-sea life" that complement the book's breathtaking images with fascinating commentary on the science of marine biology, the ecology of deep-sea habitats, and the history of deep-sea exploration—making this book one of the most comprehensive introductions to life in the deep sea ever published.

The Press has put together a special website where you can view even more images, learn more about the book, and read some of the other great reviews it has received.

Archived in Biology | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 14, 2007

Press Release: Bliss, The Discovery of Insulin

In The Discovery of Insulin—a brilliant, definitive history of one of the most significant and controversial medical events of modern times—award-winning historian Michael Bliss brings to light a bizarre clash of scientific personalities. When F. G. Banting and J. J. R. Macleod won the 1923 Nobel Prize for discovering and isolating insulin, Banting immediately announced that he was dividing his share of the prize with his young associate, C. H. Best. Macleod divided his share with a fourth member of the team, J. B. Collip. For the next sixty years medical opinion was intensely divided over the allotment of credit for the discovery of insulin. In resolving this controversy, Bliss also offers a wealth of new detail on such subjects as the treatment of diabetes before insulin and the life-and-death struggle to manufacture insulin.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 04:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

May 11, 2007

Press Release: Koslow, The Silent Deep

For thousands of years, both scientists and novices alike underestimated the enormous diversity of life in the deep seas. And until recently, they were right—or at least they were not yet proved wrong. Only in the last fifty years or so did the deep sea reveal itself to be a source of unimaginable wonders—Lilliputian fauna on the seafloor; seemingly bizarre life forms at mid-ocean depths; profusion of life at hot vents, cold seeps, and whale falls; and coldwater corals and fisheries on seamounts and deepwater reefs. The deep sea is, indeed, the last unexplored frontier on the planet.

But just as research and exploration are rendering the briny deep accessible, a host of new threats is endangering it—the spread of trawling into the deep ocean, the buildup of humanity's worst pollutants in deepwater life-forms, the potential consequences of climate change and ocean acidification, and the future mining of seabed minerals and methane hydrates for hydrocarbons. The Silent Deep: The Discovery, Ecology, and Conservation of the Deep Sea tells the stories of discovery of the deep sea, the ecologies of its ecosystems, and of the impact of humans, highlighting the importance of global stewardship in keeping this delicate ecosystem alive and well.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 03:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 09, 2007

Review: Cheney, Baboon Metaphysics

The ALA's Booklist magazine recently ran a positive review of Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth's new book, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. The review notes that many recent book-length studies of primates have successfully documented primate social organization, but not until Cheney and Seyfarth's ground breaking new study has anyone attempted to document the intelligence that underlies it. Nancy Bent writes for Booklist:

Primatologists Cheney and Seyfarth have studied the same troop of chacma baboons since 1992, and here they demonstrate the importance of their social behavior. Living in a world of predators, baboons must rely on each other for safety, and the resulting large groups they live in are perfect hotbeds for complicated relationships. Matrilineal groups of females retain status by helping their own kin, whereas males act individually and for themselves. Females form short-term bonds with males for mating and long-term friendships with the same or other males for protection. But how do baboons view the world? How do they decide who to associate with, who to defer to, and who to dominate? Cheney and Seyfarth discuss these and other related questions in a style that both explains complex concepts and challenges the reader.

Written with a scientist's precision and a nature-lover's eye, Baboon Metaphysics gives us an unprecedented and compelling glimpse into the mind of another species.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Anthropology |