Grand Ambitions, Modest Goals

At the beginning of this year, I set myself an exercise target. Of course, I am hardly the first to resolve in early January to get fitter; of course, this is hardly the first time I have done it myself. What’s been different this year is that I settled on a target that I knew I could achieve, with minimal disruption to my normal daily routine; but a target, nonetheless, that would require persistence over the course of the whole year, and might make some noticeable improvement to my wellbeing. Now, a quarter of the way through 2016, I’m 40% of the way to my goal, and I feel… better. A bit. I feel positive, at least. I’m almost embarrassed to state my target here. Especially given where I drew inspiration - my friend James’s epic cycle around Europe last year. I am so full of admiration for that kind of monumental enterprise, and my ‘grand ambition’ might be something similar - kayak around Britain’s wonderful coast, perhaps, or walk another of our long distance footpaths. But that kind of time commitment is just never going to fit in with everything else I like and have to do, certainly not until the kids are old enough to come along. Even the more typical schemes of the newly 40 are out for me - even if I fancied running a marathon I know from experience that I would not find the time for regular runs of any useful distance.

So instead, I decided to do 10,000 press-ups in 2016.

10,000 is a nice, large-ish, round number; but over the course of a year it’s also extremely do-able, easy even, with a minute’s commitment on more days than not. Even I can find that. I can do it late evening, I can do it anywhere there’s 6’ of vacant floor, I can even do it after a drink or two. Of course, this regime is never going to propel me to any kind of superhuman levels of fitness. At this stage, now that I’m older than pundits, coaches, even fathers of international players of sports I follow, I think I have finally let go of that dream. Oh and, if you know me - don’t expect to notice any difference in my appearance. My body weight remains a constant ‘scrawny’ more or less whatever I throw at myself; exercise merely redistributes it to somewhat more flattering locations than do food and drink. (Whether you find that enviable or not depends, I submit, on whether you grew up a chunky or a skinny teen…)

But for all that, I do feel a little better, physically and mentally, and I’m now so far ahead of schedule - and accelerating further ahead - that I might yet end up aiming a bit higher.

As for the purpose of writing this on a science blog?

Well, ambition is a great thing, a necessary thing - to paraphrase Browning, if our reach does not exceed our grasp, then what are Science and Nature for? But it’s goals that get things done. And by persistently attaining modest goals, you can end up achieving a surprising amount. This is the thinking behind the well known advice to write every day - advice I am much more inclined to heed now. As every writer knows, starting is the hardest thing, so find an easy way in: get that methods section underway, that study site description; just get a few sentences down and that paper will be written one hundred words at a time.

Listen - if you’re the Eddie Izzard type, go ahead and run your marathons and aim for the stratosphere and good luck to you. I will follow your career with respect and admiration. But if you feel crushed by such grand ambitions, why not set yourself some modest goals? Make them goals you know you can meet, that cannot be derailed by the slings and arrows of reviewer 3; make them goals that, given a fair wind, you might well exceed. For instance: I’ve not succumbed to science Twitter’s encouragement to read #365papers - I might read more papers by striving for one a day, but as soon as it was obvious that I would fall short (after about #7papers, probably…), I’d lose heart. Maybe next year though I’ll sign up to #52papers - which would still be a worthwhile boost to my scholarship, and one much more likely to get ticked off.

Which raises a final important point: keep score. My press-ups are logged in a google spreadsheet, so I can tap the day’s tally in on my phone and instantly see my running total. I am lazy, unmotivated, a procrastinator extraordinaire; but I am a competitive sod, and keeping my foot on the throat of that tally drives me on. So many metrics quantify our scientific output, but it’s up to us to record our progress towards those outputs - words or lines of code written, organisms sorted and identified, seeds sown, papers read. Get those tables drawn up, and commit to beating yourself at your own game.

Anyway. I’m unlikely to write a self-help book, and much of the above in any case is just elementary project management. But I’ve found the setting of modest goals a useful way to sidle up to grander ambitions. Talking of which, that’s my 900 words written for today. Must push on. Or even, push-up…

Trait databases: the desirable and the possible

Another major traits database has recently come online. This time, all you need to know about the life histories of 21,000+ amniotes (reptiles, birds, mammals), courtesy Nathan Myhrvold, Morgan Ernest and colleagues. I’ve been working with ecological traits for a good while now, and this kind of thing excites me. It also demonstrates the kind of self-interested altruism that typifies the Open Science mentality. As Morgan puts it in her blog post on the paper:

The project started because my collaborator, Nathan Myhrvold, and I both had projects we were interested in that involved comparing life history traits of reptiles, mammals, and birds, and only mammals had easily accessible life history databases with broad taxonomic coverage. So, we decided to work together to fix this. To save others the hassle of redoing what we were doing, we decided to make the dataset available to the scientific community.

In other words, you start by fixing a problem that you yourself have, and then make your solution available to save others the bother. Practical and admirable. The same thing is happening elsewhere, with other kinds of ecological data - take the ‘data rescuing’ example of the PREDICTS project:

https://twitter.com/KatheMathBio/status/676448069890744321

(Compare and contrast with this fascinating, frustrating new book by John William Prothero, The Design of Mammals: A Scaling Approach, another monumental data compilation which includes a multitude of intriguing scaling relationships, calculated from 16,000 records for around 100 response variables, almost none of which are replicable from the subsets of data provided in the Resources section online.)

But Morgan’s blog post becomes really interesting as she muses on the what the end game might be for traits databases. She proposes a centralised trait database, with a focus on individual records, that is easy to contribute to and where data are easily accessible. We had a short exchange on Twitter after reading this, but I’ve continued mulling it over and my thoughts have expanded past 140 characters. Hence, this.

Basically, I have been trying to imagine what this kind of meta-dataset might look like. And my difficulty in doing this in part boils down to how we define a ‘trait’.

The simplest definition is pretty broad, with a trait just any measurable property of an organism (noting that some ‘traits’ apply only to populations - e.g. abundance - or even entire species - e.g. range size). And my own work, like Morgan’s, has typically focused on life history and ecological traits - things like size, growth, reproduction, and feeding. In some respects these are some of the simplest traits to describe, but they can still be tough to measure, and (especially) to classify and record.

Part of this difficulty arises because much work on traits involves imposing categories on nature, and nature abhors a category. Then again, individuals of the same species can do quite different things, or the same individual might display different traits at different times or in different places. Some people have tried to get around this by using a ‘fuzzy coding’ approach - for instance, rather than having to classify me as ‘carnivore’ or ‘herbivore’, you could say that my diet is split, say, 15% carnivore to 85% herbivore. In many ways this seems a sensible solution, but it is of course rather subjective, still requires some rather arbitrary categorisation, and, in the context of this post, is very difficult to incorporate into a more generic database.

Other traits may seem simpler. Body size, for example, the so-called ‘master trait’, us surely easy to measure? You just weigh your organism, right? Or perhaps you measure it’s length. And is that total length, or wingspan, or leg length, or standard length? Oh, you want dry weight? Or mgC? Equivalent Sperical Volume, you say? And so on and on…

Related to body size are other morphological traits. For instance, my colleague Gavin Thomas and his group are busy 3D scanning beaks of all species of bird (you can help, if you like!). Such sophisticated morphological measurement quickly generate individual-level ‘trait’ databases of many dimensions; how might these be incorporated into a more general database? Record each dimension? Or use some agreed (but somewhat arbitrary) composite measure of ‘shape’?

One more example of a different class of traits. On the Marine Ecosystems Research Programme, I’m working quite a bit with ecosystem modellers, and their lists of desired traits are terrifying: Michaelis Menton half sat. uptake const.; Excreted ingested fraction; Respired fraction - all things that seem a long way from the sorts of life history databases I’m familiar with, or from things that can be easily observed in the field. Many of them will be body size and temperature dependent (at least). And so what might be most appropriate to record are the parameters from some fitted scaling relationship; but this means losing a lot of raw data, which surely we would like to retain?

And so on.

So whilst of course I applaud the efforts of people like Morgan to make large trait databases more useful and accessible, and agree completely that we should both think big and think individual, a complementary angle of attack might be to make linking existing databases easier. Of course, they need to be available, well documented, and appropriately licensed as a first step, and straightforward programmatic access should be designed in. But we can also make more efforts to link to taxonomic standards, to ensure we include accurate geographical and contextual information with individual records. Always ensuring our data are nice and tidy so that others can easily do more interesting things with them.

A Rational Optimist's Reluctant Case for Panic

As European rugby fans look back with regret on (yet!) a(nother!!) chastening weekend, one of Monday’s papers put up a poll: When do you think a northern hemisphere team will next win the World Cup? There was a choice of the next five tournaments, 2019 to 2036. (Plus ‘none of the above’, one assumes…) Which got me thinking about something that has been nagging at me for a while. On this kind of timescale - a few years to a few decades into the future - I just don’t think people are very good at conceiving of fundamental change. Rather, and more-or-less regardless (so I contend) of how well informed we might be about the facts of global social, technological, or environmental change - we sort of assume that life will carry on just about how it always has within our experience, with incremental developments maybe, but without major upset. So while the players at major sports events will change, the basic pattern - a big, multi-week jamboree involving mass movement of people around the world, major new infrastricture, huge inputs of cash, energy, water, and so on - will remain, we expect, essentially identical. Hence we start planning for the 2036 World Cup now.

Certainly, this has always been my belief. Although I’ve been concerned about environmental issues for as long as I can remember, I consider myself (favourably, of course) to be towards the optimistic end of rational. So I find it very hard to believe that any of the properly charismatic species will ever really be allowed to go extinct; and I have this powerful faith (i.e., belief without a shred of evidence) that we as a society will in the end, when it really matters, pull something out the bag on climate change. To a certain extent, parenthood enforces such an outlook - first of all we convince ourselves that we are bringing life into what is basically a favourable world; and then we try to ensure our kids have childhoods as good - preferably better - as our own were. Incremental change, on an overall upward trajectory.

But a couple of things I’ve read recently have shaken that stubborn optimism of mine, to the extent that I’m starting to find casual talk of a 2036 World Cup faintly ridiculous.

First, Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. Read as a primer in Marxist theory, in economic and industrial history, in neoliberalism and its sinister symptoms, it is compelling. I was less convinced by some of the projections - for instance, his energy analysis seems shaky and whilst Wikipedia is wonderful, it bears an awful lot of the weight of Mason’s arguments about a future of unlimited free stuff and no need to work. (Oh, and his data visualisations are just awful.) But it’s a terrific read nonetheless (subject, I hope, of a full post in due course); and it is, in parts, terrifying. For instance, in laying out the looming pensions crisis - evident already in the imminent downgrading of my own (excellent, public sector) policy. And the economic consequences of taking climate change seriously (as he argues that we must), which include a collapse in the share value of some of the world’s largest companies, if (when!) we tell them that large fractions, perhaps 60-80%, of the assets on which this value is based - as yet unburnt fossil fuel reserves - must stay in the ground. In fact, I was convinced enough to adapt the title of his ninth chapter for this post. And, reluctantly, I'm leaning towards seeing our current, post-crash situation as more than a painful period of austerity that will end as soon as we vote the nasty posh boys out of office, but rather as a sign of far less pleasant things to come. As Mason puts it,

“The OECD’s economists were too polite to say it, so let’s spell it out: for the developed world the best of capitalism is behind us, and for the rest it will be over in our lifetime.”

The second key book for me has been David Mitchell’s wonderful novel The Bone Clocks. I’m a long-time Mitchell fan, I just love the worlds he creates, and suspend my disbelief willingly for his forays into the supernatural simply because of the power of his characters and the beauty of his prose. The Bone Clocks follows one of his most vivid creations yet, Holly Sykes, through six intertwined novellas and across seven decades, from the 1980s to the 2040s. And it is the final section, set in rural Ireland in 2043, that presents such a stark imagining of a drastically different future. Here is Holly, a few years older than me but basically of my generation, who has lived - as I have - with the rise of technology into every aspect of life; but who in her 70s is now experiencing the ‘endarkenment’ - chaotic times of 21^st Century tech that still works occasionally, of power for those who can generate their own energy or grow their own food, or who have the might to take that from others. My copy of The Bone Clocks includes a short interview with Mitchell, in which he is asked whether this dystopian end to the novel reflects his own view. “Yes”, he responds,

“I’m afraid our civilisation is defecating in the well from which it draws life. We’re leaving our grandchildren a hotter and less secure world… We’re intelligent, but we’re not wise.”

Now I’ve read similar sentiments countless times from environmental prophets of doom, but taken alongside my research into the implications of population 10 billion  for this adventure, as well as Postcapitalism and the rest, I find myself concluding that life in twenty or thirty years time - and forget the grandkids, this is for me, for us - might very well be very different from how it is now. So I’m actually not too fussed about losing perks from my pension, simply because the I can't really imagine the plan of retiring comfortably sometime in the 2040s panning out…

The optimist in me still thinks of the resilience of nature - a different, feral, nature maybe, but nature nonetheless - and of humanity. Sure, we’re seeing the what Kevin Gaston call’s the ‘extinction of experience’, the sad loss of connection with nature; but as I’ve written before, I think baselines shift: people just get used to this new normal and find joy where they can. I fervently hope my kids get to see some real nature, but I know too that they won’t regret what they have not known; that regardless they will be complex, connected, happy-sad members of the 10 billion.

But I will regret.

And thus underperforming sports teams are placed in proper perspective.