Book Review: WTF, Evolution?

Note: This program first aired January 17, 2015.

I read a lot of books, science and nature books mostly, and I am always on the lookout for new work that effectively translates heady science concepts into engaging understandable material for the public. 2005’s fabulously funny “How Animals Have Sex: A guide to the reproductive habits of creatures great and small” by David Strorm is a great example. It’s a small format, full color photographic book that surveys the amusing sex lives of a wide variety of animals. The heady topic in question? That life is incredibly diverse, and evolution has come up with an amazing array of ways for life to go on, that is, for animals to reproduce. It answers questions you’ve always wondered like, how do dolphins and whales mate? What about porcupines? And then titillates the reader with fun facts about animals you may have never heard of like Bean Weevils and Spoon Worms and Argentine Lake Ducks. I consider How Animals Have Sex to have set a high standard for this genre.

So it was with pleasure that I purused Mara Grunbaum’s “WTF, Evolution?! A theory of unintelligible design”, a 2014 release from Workman Publishing. WTF, Evolution?! follows the same small format, full color photographic design, with a sort of scrap book-y layout. The author imagines an ongoing conversation with Evolution, and the book is full of cheeky irreverent dialog, sharp enough to get your attention, smart enough to keep it. The narrator’s skeptical comments and dead pan retorts are contrasted by enthusiasm in the voice of Evolution. Each section is prefaced by a short explanation of some facet of the mechanisms of Evolution, highlighting how adaptations have given the world some very strange solutions to otherwise straightforward biological problems.

The main goal of the book is to showcase the diversity of strange adaptations that have evolved in the animal kingdom over the last 3.8 billion years on this planet. In doing so Grunbaum highlights  key misconceptions about evolution, that it has a goal in mind or some kind of intention, and that humans are the apex of evolutionary adaptation. Evolution is precisely not directional, and has no end goal in mind. As she says in the introduction “Like the rest of us, it’s basically just fumbling in the dark”. Genetic engineering aside, evolution is profoundly limited by its starting material. It can only work with the genes that are in the gene pool. The only source of new material is mutation, which happens with regularity yet doesn’t yield viable new genetic material all that often. Not every mutation is adaptive, but if it doesn’t have a negative effect, it can get taken along for the ride and persist along side genes that increase an individual’s fitness. And that makes the fact of the incredible diversity of animal forms (and they are almost entirely animals in this book) simultaneously bewildering and understandable.

If you are interested in evolution, find animal diversity fascinating, like to laugh and don’t take yourself too seriously, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy WTF, Evolution?! At a bare minimum you will see evolution from a new angle, and regardless of where you are standing, a new perspective is something that benefits us all.

References:

Yes, its real: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigbutt_worm

How Animals Have Sex http://www.betterworldbooks.com/how-animals-have-sex-id-1592401910.aspx

WTF Evolution?! http://wtfevolution.tumblr.com/

Book Review: Spillover

Note: This program first aired on July 19, 2014.

One of my stated goals for this summer is to read. Reading is a deep pleasure for me, one I am not able to do as freely as I would like during the school year, and I have come to realize that if you want to read a lot, you have to consciously make time for it, thus my summer goal.

I want to share with you today one of the books from the first half of my summer, and it’s not your typical beach read, though I think many listeners might find it very interesting. The book is David Quammen’s Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. Quammen is a frequent contributor to National Geographic, which funded much of the research for this book, and author of several works of fiction and non fiction, the most well known of which is probably Song of the Dodo. Spillover is not for the faint of heart. It takes us on a journey all around the world, and spends most of its time in equatorial Africa and southeast Asia, tracing the paths of various diseases, some you have never heard of, others have been in the news for years. The diseases Quammen catalogs are in the running to be the Next Big One, and they all employ an ecological strategy that makes them ideal candidates.

The pathogens that cause diseases including influenza, SARS (or Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome), the very timely Ebola, Hendra, Herpes B, Rabies, Hanta, Nipah, and Marburg viruses, HIV/AIDS, Bubonic Plague, Lyme disease, Yellow Fever, Dengue Fever, in fact 60% of human infectious diseases are what is called “zoonotic”. A zoonotic pathogen, (or zoonosis) is one that resides in an animal reservoir, causing no harm to that animal species, but when circumstances are just right, can “spill over” into humans and cause disease in us (hence the name of the book). In the first example of the book, Quammen describes the outbreak of a little known (but very lethal) disease that affected humans and horses in Australia. It became known as Hendra virus, and after much field work, the reservoir was determined to be flying foxes, a type of bat, roosting in a tree in a horse paddock. The virus did not affect the bats at all, presumably it had coevolved with this particular species of bat over millions of years, but it turned out to be lethal to horses, exposed to the virus in bat urine and guano raining down from the tree in their paddock, and to the humans that were caring for the sick horses. The outbreak ended, but the virus is still there. A certain percentage of these flying foxes still carry this virus, which is why zoonotic diseases are virtually impossible to eradicate. We would have to kill literally every infected flying fox to eliminate this virus. That same story, of an animal host and a certain set of circumstances that allows for a spill over into humans is repeated for all of the zoonotic pathogens.

Those pathogens are mostly viruses by the way. Viruses are barely considered alive, because they can’t replicate themselves, they require the machinery of a host cell to do that for them. They have relatively short packets of genetic information, and when they hijack a cell’s DNA reproducing machinery, they are especially prone to error. Error sounds like a bad thing, and most of the time it is, mistakes in copying DNA usually lead to death, death of an individual viron. Occasionally though, an error leads to a new trait, one that affects the behavior of the viron, perhaps making it more hardy, more easily transmissible or able to infect a new species. That is evolution, and it is one of Quammen’s two main points about zoonotic disease. Ecology puts us in the path of these pathogens. As human behavior causes us to push further and further into wild habitats and deranges the order of natural ecosystems, we provide more and more opportunities for spill over. Its not that these pathogens seek us out, far from it, its just that there are so many of us, over 7 billion of us. We are getting harder to avoid. Ecology, our interactions with the world around us creates the opportunity, and evolution allows the pathogens to adapt to life in a human body.

This book is richly detailed and intensely researched. Quammen clearly spent years in the field in close proximity to spill over conditions to bring us this work. Its fascinating but if you are the type of person to lay awake at night worrying about things beyond your control, you may want to skip it. I for one, feel that knowledge can be empowering, so I read this book with gusto. In the end, when the Next Big One does emerge, and there is no doubt that it will, our actions as individuals actually do make a difference. We can make choices that these pathogens can’t, and these choices, along with the knowledge gathered by hundreds of brave scientists will help dampen the effect of whatever pandemic is coming next.

  

References:

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, David Quammen, 2012 W.W. Norton

A Lovely Book: The Urban Bestiary

  Note: This program first aired on April 26, 2014. 

As a writer it’s a rare and unexpected delight to encounter a book you identify so completely with or admire so much that you wish you had written it. The wickedly funny How Animals Have Sex is one such book for me. Carl Safina’s  gorgeous The View from Lazy Point is another. Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is so good I had to stop reading it, if you can believe that. I feared I would devour it too quickly, and in my greed forget to savor each perfect line and verse. As a writer at the beginning of her career, these books fill me with giddy inspiration, and anticipation for what I may someday be able to produce, if I am lucky, if I am tenacious, if I work as hard as I can.

One of the benefits, and perhaps curses of small town living is that everyone thinks they know everyone else’s business, so when my local librarian mentioned that she had heard about a book that she thought I would like, and had ordered it for me I was a tad taken aback. I am used to making my own decisions about what I read, and value immensely the pleasure of the discovery of a book that piques my interest, so I was more than a little skeptical about my librarian’s presumption. But I figured, so what, its just a book. I don’t have to read it.

It turns out that in my heart, I owe that librarian an apology and a huge debt of gratitude. The book she took it upon herself to request for me, The Urban Bestiary by Lyanda Lynn Haupt is a gift, and is getting placed on that sparsely populated top shelf among the books I desperately wish I had written myself. Her premise is simple; she takes the medieval concept of the bestiary, a written compendium of animal lore, and applies it to modern urban living. Each chapter chronicles an organism increasingly encountered in urban or near urban settings, habitats humans have appropriated for themselves. The mammals and birds she describes, are, with an exception or two, common everywhere in North America; most of us encounter squirrels and chickadees on a daily basis. While this may sound like a mundane book about the animals one might encounter on a trip to the city park, it is so much more than that. Personal accounts of animals (and even a tree) are interwoven with natural history, human and wild life interactions and ecological philosophy in an impeccable balance that never strays into the esoteric. Haupt’s pitch is perfect when it comes to blending the details of the specific life histories of this species or that with the philosophical context for why we feel the way we do about these animals. In the introduction Haupt confesses that she made an effort to literally write most of the book outside, as readers we reap the rewards of this endeavor. This is a thoughtful, mindful book that has its feet planted firmly on the ground.

I have made it my life’s work to pursue that which makes me feel more grounded, more attuned, more connected to the natural world. This book made me feel all of that, but even more, The Urban Bestiary made me feel connected to another human being, some one who feels the same way I do, who thinks the same thoughts and holds the same values. Some one who has read all the books I want to read, and has devoted deep and careful time to all the ideas I’ve tried to think, someone living perhaps a parallel universe version of my life. What I found in this book was not just beautiful words about our relationship with nature, but in fact, an easing of my loneliness. Somewhere out there, there’s some one just like me, and I found her, she wrote this book.

So read this book, read it sitting outside in the spring sunlight, read it by the window where you watch your bird feeder, read it lying beneath your favorite tree. Read it and prepare to be cracked open just a little bit, I can assure you it feels good, it feels really good. Read it and you will remember all the things you used to know without knowing about how your body is made of the same earth as trees and chickadees and squirrels and stars. I guarantee you will feel less alone as a result.

References:

Lyanda Haupt’s official website: http://www.lyandalynnhaupt.com/

Lyanda Haupt’s blog about an “urban earthen household” http://thetanglednest.com/