Trust in Darwin?

It’s the beginning of the academic year, which means students – hundreds of them, with their haircuts and their baggy skinny jeans and their enthusiasm. Indeed, I’ve just seen one of our zoology undergrads in a ‘Trust in Darwin’ T-Shirt, which reminded me of the uneasy feeling I occasionally felt during last year’s Darwinfest – the dual anniversary of the birth of a great man, and of the publication of his seminal work 50 years later. Let me explain. I would never dispute Darwin’s exceptional qualities, difficult though they are to pin down. For instance, last autumn I saw Jim Moore, co-author of Darwin’s Sacred Cause, present his thesis that Darwin drew his motivation from his moral drive, and that his firm abolitionist stance was key in the development of his ideas of a single family of all human races (and by extension all of life).

I found this a pretty convincing argument; just as, a few weeks before, I had been convinced by Phil Rainbow from the Natural History Museum, who had argued Darwin’s painstaking study of barnacles – culminating in a series of monographs that are still widely consulted – was the real making of him. Surely, studying repeated patterns in the morphology of these atypical crustaceans might easily have stimulated his thoughts on common descent?

In the end, I concluded that what made Darwin exceptional was in fact this combination of qualities – the zeal of the moral crusader, the patience of the brilliant natural historian, the analytical mindset of the natural born scientist. He had the good fortune to be an educated gentleman during a particularly receptive period for new ideas, but his skills, insight and dedication turned these advantages into a series of works of global significance.

So clearly, it is right to celebrate the life and work of Charles Darwin. But the whole ‘Trust in Darwin’ thing concerns me, and seems indicative of the continued conflation in many peoples’ minds of man and his oeuvre with the entire science of evolutionary biology. This is evident wherever creationists venture, using ‘Darwinist’ as a term of abuse, and gleefully pointing out errors or inconsistencies in Darwin’s 150 year old work. Personally I don’t think this is helped by the kind of reverence in which Darwin is held by a certain vintage of evolutionary biologist – you know, the middle-aged professor who fancies himself (it is always a him) as an old school Victorian gentleman naturalist.

This is unfortunate because – whisper it – Darwin’s not actually that relevant to the 21st Century student of evolutionary biology. Of course, to put the subject in historical context his works remain invaluable. Likewise, career-defining papers are still occasionally written on the basis of an untested hypothesis dredged from his notebooks. But for an overview of what we know about evolutionary biology, Darwin is probably the last place to look. Skip along the library shelf just a little bit, and you’d find the book that served me as an undergraduate primer in evolution – Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker. There are plenty of others, with Steve Jones’ Almost Like a Whale particularly notable as it copies the structure of On The Origin of Species, simply updating every chapter with over a century of scientific progress.

And this is a crucial point, one that gets lost in an overly fawning appreciation of Darwin. It is a key difference between a scientific viewpoint and a faith-based position. Science allows no room for sentiment, and has no sacred texts. Darwin was brilliant, insightful, but not infrequently plain wrong, for instance on the matter of the mechanism of heredity. It is not heretical to point out these errors, and it is a strength of evolutionary theory that it has constantly, incrementally improved over 150 years.

So while it is right that Darwin’s anniversaries should be celebrated, let’s not fall into the cult of the personality, the fetishisation of his name as something to ‘trust’. We are, after all, supposed to be on the shoulders of giants, looking onwards, not at their feet, looking up.

NESTA Crucible: a eulogy

In these tough economic times™ lots of things that we care about, and which rely on public funding, are coming under increased scrutiny. The case for science has been well made elsewhere – I’m sure you’re aware of the Science is Vital campaign, and if not you should be. You should also take a look at Shrigley’s equally impassioned, and equally watertight case for the arts (it’s very funny too). Given the threats to both of these sectors, it is perhaps not surprising that the continued existence of NESTA, which exists to foster innovation across sciences and the arts, is also being questioned. (I should point out that NESTA is funded by an endowment from the National Lottery rather than through tax revenue, and that their stated aim to harness innovation to solve major economic and social problems sounds like the kind of thing that politicians have been asking for, but I digress…) The initiative that brought me into contact with NESTA is, however, already extinct. The Crucible programme ran for just a few years, and is described as

…a series of residential workshops run by NESTA to help researchers, who face demanding challenges in their own fields, to network and look to solve more complex challenges across several disciplines. By bringing bright thinkers together, Crucible was designed to help people see the bigger picture…

I came across Crucible early in 2007, when I was applying for jobs and fellowships left right and centre. I kept getting shortlisted, even had a few interviews, always followedby the professional equivalent of ‘I really like you but…’

I can’t remember where I saw the Crucible advert, but the application process was suitably short, and the questions suitably intriguing (‘Please tell us about yourself’, ‘Please give details of your activities outside research’, and so on) that I thought I’d give it a go. In fact, I ended up spewing out all the stuff I normally had to cut from ‘proper’ applications, in a continuous stream of consciousness, and just sending it off. (The wonders of Spotlight – I’ve just found my application, and cringe slightly at the first line: “I am an ecologist by training; by inclination I am a 17th Century Natural Philosopher”; and so on…)

So anyway, somehow I got on it, and it changed my life.

The 2007 cohort was a group of around 30 early career researchers – from across the natural and social sciences, from academia and industry. A major part of Crucible’s success, then, came from providing a space for people from different disciplines to interact, to recognise common ground, to explore possible collaborations. Many of the more memorable sessions involved the interface of science and the arts, visual and sonic, and I think this brought home to me more than anything how creative good science can be.

But it was the social aspect more than anything that defined Crucible. In our departmentalised world, we seldom get the chance to sit down and talk to people from across disciplines, about the kinds of issues that affect us all (I guess NN and other networks provide a similar forum, but virtually, and with less beer). It was kind of how I imagine an idealised high table to be at an Oxbridge College – stimulating conversation with intelligent and articulate people.

Of course, in our impact obsessed world, NESTA needed evidence of outputs, but that kind of missed the point of Crucible. The output was the event itself, the conversations and network and friendships, the seeds of ideas sown. For interdisciplinary work, this is in fact half the battle. So although many of us were prepared to write glowing statements about the effect that Crucible had on us personally, tangible results were thin on the ground. And I suspect this is the major reason why Crucible was culled – despite near universtal positive feedback.

Now, Crucible lives on in Scotland and Wales, but the NESTA’s involvement has ceased. It would be great to think someone else might take up the challenge to organise something similar in the future – something residential, interdisciplinary, creative. Crucible widened my horizons and picked me up from the confidence slump I was in at the time, and it’s sad to see it pass.

Cool stuff whales do

It’s a sunny day, I’m on one of my favourite train routes (up the Northumberland coast, between Newcastle and Edinburgh), en route for St Andrews – home, indeed, of the Sea Mammal Research Unit – so it seems appropriate to forget a recent funding disappointment, and the brewing scientific feud I described last week, and to concentrate instead on cool stuff that whales do. Please don’t expect anything about communication, intelligence, or other cuddly things; this is a tale of death and defecation. Two recent papers highlight the vital roles that the great whales have played in marine ecosystems, and in the global climate system more generally. Given the couple of centuries of concerted effort humanity expended in transforming whales into lamp oil, scrimshaw and corsets, they provide another sobering case study of how we’ve managed to fritter away those very natural resources that keep the world a habitable place.

The first paper, by Pershing et al., concerns the role of the great whales in locking up carbon. As they say,

In terms of their size and potential to store carbon for years or decades, marine vertebrates [especially the large whales] are the only organisms in the ocean comparable to large trees.

They use simple metabolic scaling to show that large animals are more efficient at storing carbon than are smaller animals:

…the same amount of primary productivity can support a higher biomass of large individuals due to the increase in metabolic efficiency with increasing size.

So krill, the small crustaceans on which the Southern Ocean ecosystem is based, are pretty rubbish as carbon stores – too small, and with too rapid a turnover. Blue whales, on the other hand, are great. What’s more, if they aren’t eaten or otherwise removed from the sea, even when they die whales perform an important carbon storage function: sinking carcasses can export carbon from the shallow, sunny surface waters to the deep ocean, where it is likely to remain for 100s or 1000s of years.

Perhaps the neatest part of the paper is in using estimates of pre-industrial whaling biomass of the really big species, to calculate the ‘carbon footprint’ of whaling. First, they estimate that whaling removed 1.7 × 10^7^ tons of C from marine ecosystems. They estimate the upper-bound of the pre-whaling flux to be “1.9 × 10^6^ tons C yr^-1^, or 0.1% of the ocean’s net carbon sink”, and they estimate that whaling contributed a total of 2.35 × 10^7^ t of C to the atmosphere.

The logical consequence of this is that restoring whale stocks will benefit the climate. For instance,

rebuilding the southern hemisphere blue whale population would sequester 3.6×10^6^ tons C in living biomass…[these] new blue whales would be equivalent to preserving 43,000 hectares of temperate forest, an area comparable in size to the City of Los Angeles.

The authors note that such figures compare favourably to other climate remediation schemes, notable geoengineering plans to use iron to fertilise the oceans. Intriguingly, whales may perform this role too. The second cool paper is by Nicol et al., and the start of the abstract sets it up nicely:

Iron is the limiting micronutrient in the Southern Ocean and experiments have demonstrated that addition of soluble iron to surface waters results in phytoplankton blooms, particularly by large diatoms. Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) eat diatoms and recycle iron in surface waters when feeding. Baleen whales eat krill, and, historically, defecation by baleen whales could have been a major mechanism for recycling iron, if whale faeces contain significant quantities of iron.

They go on to show that whale poo is, indeed, rich in iron. More specifically, krill are rich in iron, and whales absorb this. But their most crucial role is in converting the iron locked up in krill into a form that is more ‘bioavailable’:

Baleen whale faeces are released as a slurry, which disperses rapidly in the surface layer. [Pre-exploitation]… whales consumed some 190 million tonnes of krill per year … thus they converted some 7600 tonnes of iron in krill into iron-rich faeces every year… Thus, whales would have been part of a positive feedback loop that maintained primary productivity by efficiently recycling iron in the surface waters. Larger populations of whales would have led to enhanced primary productivity and this larger food source would have potentially supported bigger krill populations.

Which is exactly what the geoengineers want to achieve with artificial iron fertilisation. Who’d’ve thunk the climate change generation would be recycling the rather retro rallying cry of the 70s environmental movement?

Save the Whale!