The Best Australian Science Writing 2011

theâ•›best australian science writing 201â•› 1 Stephen Pincock has been writing about science for 20 years. He is a ...

Author: Stephen Pincock and Peter Doherty (Editors)

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theâ•›best

australian

science writing 201â•› 1

Stephen Pincock has been writing about science for 20 years. He is a correspondent for Nature magazine, and a contributor to the Financial Times, The Lancet, The Australian and numerous other publications. He is also the author or co-author of popular science books on codes and ciphers, the origins of the universe and human intelligence.

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theâ•›best

australian

science writing 201â•› 1

E di t e d by St e ph e n Pi n co c k


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A NewSouth book Published by NewSouth Publishing University of New South Wales Press Ltd University of New South Wales Sydney NSW 2052 AUSTRALIA newsouthpublishing.com © University of New South Wales Press Ltd 2011 First published 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is copyright. While copyright of the work as a whole is vested in University of New South Wales Press Ltd, copyright of individual chapters is retained by the chapter authors. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Title:Â€The Best Australian science writing 2011/edited by Stephen Pincock. ISBN:Â€978 174223 300 0 (pbk.) Subjects: Science. Other Authors/Contributors: Pincock, Stephen. Dewey Number: 500 Design Josephine Pajor-Markus Printer Ligare This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.


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Contents

Advisory panel viii Contributors x Foreword 1 Peter C. Doherty Introduction 6 Stephen Pincock Bad hotel 12 Anna Funder Science without a capital S 17 Robyn Williams You should probably just move oceans, male Gulf pipefish 28 Becky Crew The trouble with genes 32 Elizabeth Finkel There is no mercury in vaccines 44 Deb Hodgkin Is your brain making you fat? 46 Michael Cowley


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It’s time to talk 50 Kate Legge To save a species 62 Deborah Smith Birth of a killer 68 Sonia Shah Lousy science 75 Christine Kenneally A fresh look at Earth 79 Tim Flannery How to keep the river flowing 93 Jessica Weir Blame it on the Stones 98 Rob Brooks In the age of fishes 106 Nyssa Skilton Tiger by the tail 111 Robert Reid Gone viral 118 Frank Bowden Skin feeders 122 Katherine Fleming Once were dinosaurs 126 John Pickrell Australian floods 141 Germaine Greer


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No escaping the science 148 Clive Hamilton How aqua regia saved Nobel Prize medals from the Nazis 158 Captain Skellett Extremes of sound 162 Bryan Gaensler String theory ties us in knots 180 Marcelo Gleiser Deepak Chopra 183 Richard Hughes Twinkling stars 188 Karl Kruszelnicki Flesh and stardust 192 Richard King Is anybody out there? 208 Paul Davies Acknowledgments 220


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Advisory panel

Professor Michael Bird, FRSE, is JCU Distinguished Professor and Federation Fellow in the School of Earth and Environmental Science at James Cook University. His research combines geography, earth sciences, archaeology and biology, and uses a combination of fieldwork and geochemistry to explore the problems of modern environmental change. Professor Ken Hillman became the first formally trained Australian intensivist in the early 1980s and has been an intensive care specialist since then, working in both the United Kingdom and Australia. Currently Professor of Intensive Care at the University of New South Wales, he has a special interest in end-oflife care in acute hospitals. Professor Jeremy Mould is Professor at Swinburne University Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing and Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He has held numerous senior research positions and directorships in both the United States and Australia. In 2009 Dr Mould and his colleagues won the prestigious Gruber Prize for Cosmology for measuring the Hubble Constant, which defines the expansion rate of the universe, thus describing its size and age.

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Advisory panel

Professor Fiona Wood, Winthrop Professor at the University of Western Australia, is a plastic and reconstructive surgeon specialising in the field of burn care, trauma and scar reconstruction. The goal of her research and practice is to achieve scarless healing. After working with victims of the Bali bombings she was recognised with an Order of Australia Medal, and was named Australian of the Year in 2005.

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Contributors

Rob Brooks is Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of New South Wales, where he studies how sex impacts the lives of animals and humans. In 2010 he was made an Australian Research Council (ARC) Professorial Research Fellow and awarded the Australian Academy of Science’s Fenner Medal. He is the author of Sex, Genes & Rock ‘n’ Roll: How Evolution Has Shaped the Modern World, and he blogs on evolution and modern life at www.robbrooks.net. Frank Bowden is foundation Professor of Medicine at the Australian National University Medical School and director of the Canberra Sexual Health Centre. He has been an adviser to the Australian government on HIV and sexually transmitted infections. He has edited a book on HIV, written chapters for several textbooks and has published over a hundred scientific articles. He is a board member of the One Disease at a Time Foundation and the author of Gone Viral: The Germs that Share our Lives. Becky Crew celebrates the world’s most bizarre creatures in her blog, Save Your Breath for Running Ponies, and earned the title of Australian Science Blogger of the Year as part of a 2010 National Science Week initiative. She appears regularly on Triple J radio and is the online editor at Australia’s top science publication, COSMOS magazine.

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Contributors

Michael Cowley is a physiologist at Monash University. He conducts research into how our brains control metabolism, and develops therapies for obesity and related diseases. He was the winner of the 2009 Science Minister’s Prize for Life Scientist of the Year. Paul Davies is a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist, author and broadcaster. The author of some twenty-five books, he has an international reputation for his ability to explain advanced scientific ideas in simple language. He has won a Eureka Prize, an Advance Australia Award and the Templeton Prize, the world’s largest prize for intellectual endeavour. He is currently working at Arizona State University to establish a new centre on foundational questions in science, and is Adjunct Professor at both the University of Queensland and Macquarie University, Sydney. Peter C. Doherty, Nobel Laureate and former Australian of the Year, studies the immune system at the University of Melbourne and St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. His semi-autobiographical book, The Beginner’s Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize, was published in 2005. Elizabeth Finkel, a former geneticist, is a Melbourne-based correspondent for the US journal Science, the author of Stem Cells: Controversy at the Frontiers of Science and a contributing editor of Cosmos, and one of its founders. Her new book, The Genome Generation,Â€is due out in September 2011. Tim Flannery, acclaimed scientist, explorer and conservationist, is the author of several books, including The Future Eaters, The Weather Makers and Here on Earth. As a field biologist he has discovered and named more than thirty new species of mammals. In 2007 he was named Australian of the Year. He is currently a Professor at Sydney’s Macquarie University.

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The Best Australian Science Writing 2011

Katherine Fleming has covered health and science for more than six years, writing for magazines including Australian Geographic, The Bulletin, Medical Observer, Good Weekend and Marie Claire. She has since returned to her home state of Western Australia, where she writes news features for The West Australian newspaper. Anna Funder is the author of the international bestsellerÂ€Stasiland, which won the 2004 Samuel Johnson Prize and was published in 20 countries, and the novel, All That I Am, published in 16 countries. She is the recipient of numerous awards, and a former DAAD and Rockefeller Foundation Fellow. Anna Funder grew up in Melbourne and Paris and lives in Sydney with her husband and family. Bryan Gaensler is an astronomer, working as an Australian Laureate Fellow and Professor of Physics in the Sydney Institute for Astronomy at the University of Sydney. He is also the Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics. He is the author of Extreme Cosmos. Marcelo Gleiser is a Professor of Natural Philosophy, Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College, and author of Imperfect Creation: Cosmos, Life and Nature’s Hidden Code, published in Australia by Black Inc Books. Germaine Greer was born in Melbourne and educated in Australia and at Cambridge University. Her first book, The Female Eunuch (1969), took the world by storm and remains one of the most influential texts of the feminist movement. Germaine Greer has had a distinguished academic career in Britain and the United States. She makes regular appearances in print and other media as a broadcaster, journalist, columnist and reviewer. Since 1988 she has been Director (and financier) of Stump Cross Books, a publishing house specialising in lesser-known works by early women writers.

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Contributors

Clive Hamilton is author or co-author of the bestselling books Affluenza, Growth Fetish, Scorcher and Silencing Dissent. One of Australia’s leading thinkers, he is Charles Sturt Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. Deb Hodgkin taught science in remote schools for ten years before taking time for her children. She now writes the blog Science@home (http://science-at-home.org) to convince parents that science is fun and they should do it with their children, and they don’t need to do anything special because science is all around them. Richard Hughes is a maths and physics student at the University of Melbourne, President of the University of Melbourne Secular Society, and Education Officer for the University of Melbourne Mathematics and Statistics Society. In what is laughably called his ‘spare time’ he has been known to blog at www.divisiblebypi. com. Christine Kenneally is a journalist and author who has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times and other publications. Her book, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Kenneally has a PhD from Cambridge University and a BA (Hons) from Melbourne University. Richard King is a freelance writer living in Fremantle, WA. He writes for The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald, as well as for various magazines and journals, including Meanjin, Australian Book Review, Quadrant, Southerly, Overland, Thumbscrew, Poetry London, PN Review and the London Magazine. Karl Kruszelnicki is the Julius Sumner Miller Fellow at the University of Sydney. He has written (so far) 26 books, beginning with Great Moments In Science in 1984. Dr Kruszelnicki

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received the Member of the Order of Australia Award in the 2006 Australia Day Honours list. He has degrees in physics and maths, biomedical engineering, medicine and surgery and has worked as a physicist, tutor, film-maker, car mechanic, labourer, and as a medical doctor at the Kids’ Hospital in Sydney. Kate Legge writes for The Weekend Australian Magazine. She has worked in Canberra, Washington DC, Sydney and Melbourne covering politics and social affairs. In 1994 she was named Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year. She has won a Walkley for Magazine Feature Writing (2004) and a Quill Award for Best Feature in Print. Her debut novel, The Unexpected Elements of Love (Penguin, 2006), was long listed for the Miles Franklin Award for Australian Literature. Her second novel, The Marriage Club, was published in 2008 (also by Penguin). John Pickrell is the deputy editor of Australian Geographic magazine. He is an award-winning journalist and editor who has worked in London, Washington DC and Sydney. His articles can be found in publications including Cosmos, New Scientist, Science, BBC Wildlife Magazine and on the websites of National Geographic and the ABC. Robert Reid is an investigative journalist and writer based in north Queensland. He is the author of Croc! (Allen & Unwin), Third Party to Murder and Under A Dark Moon (both published by Blue Heeler Books). He also co-authored Patanela is Missing with journalist Paul Whittaker. Sonia Shah is a science journalist and author of the critically acclaimed Crude: The story of oil (Allen & Unwin, 2005) and Fever (Allen & Unwin, 2010). The holder of joint Australian and US citizenship, and a former writing fellow of The Nation Institute and the Puffin Foundation, her writing has appeared in The Lancet, The Nation, New Scientist and elsewhere.

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Contributors

Captain Skellett is a pirate and a science writer. Her blog, A Schooner of Science, contains tales of zombies, sea creatures and all things scientific. A freelance writer, she contributes to several magazines under an autonym, and finds the radioactive decay of teaspoons in office environments both concerning and intriguing. Nyssa Skilton is a clinical journalist at Australia’s leading medical publication, Australian Doctor. Previously, she has worked at The Canberra Times as a medical, technology and science reporter and at The Advocate newspaper in Tasmania. She completed two degrees – engineering and arts (journalism) – at the University of Tasmania in 2006. Deborah Smith is Science Editor at the Sydney Morning Herald and has specialised in science and medical reporting for most of her career with Fairfax Media. She won the Eureka Prize for Science Journalism in 2005 for her reports on the discovery of Homo floresiensis, an extinct, tiny species of humans found on the Indonesian island of Flores. Jessica Weir is the author of Murray River Country: An Ecological Dialogue with Traditional Owners (2009). Jessica works as a Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Her research focus is on the governance of native title lands, and the cultural dimensions of environmental issues. Robyn Williams has presented The Science Show on ABC Radio National since 1975. He is the author of ten books and is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and a visiting professor at the University of New South Wales. His essays have appeared in several editions of Griffith REVIEW: Making Perfect Bodies, People Like Us, Hot Air and Ways of Seeing.

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Foreword: Science writing for our time Peter C. Doherty

The continuing communication revolution defines our time. What’s most intriguing is that the written word is again stage centre. Setting aside the social media such as Facebook and Twitter, the massive expansion of material available via the web has irrevocably changed the way we access information. For instance, I check Wikipedia from time to time to see if this or that account reflects my understanding for areas of science I know well. When a topic is new to me, I often start with Wikipedia and go from there. My general experience has been that the subject matter is presented clearly, comprehensively and honestly. Never before has so much scientific information been readily and openly available. But, put ‘childhood vaccination’ into Google and the sites that give sound, well-reasoned, research-based analysis are listed along with a mass of anecdotal, emotionally driven and, at times, deliberately misleading, or just plain nutty, content that has the potential to leave any ‘lay’ reader totally confused. Therein rests both the difficulty and the virtue of the web: the lack of editorial scrutiny. On the one hand, some amoral editor-in-chief is not in a position to suppress legitimate news and comment, but on the

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other, there is often a complete absence of quality control. It’s no secret that, with all major newspapers having to go online, there has been a massive decline in the financial viability of the print media. Some charge successfully for electronic content, and it will be interesting to see how The New York Times fares with its current initiative to charge regular users, while the print versions of others have either headed massively downmarket or become unidimensional to the extent that they aim to appeal to only a narrow and generally simplistic audience. Unexamined rigidity was always true for the tabloids but, at least in Australia and the United States, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify quality newspapers that, while left or right leaning, still try to report the real news. Perhaps the most immediately depressing element of the contemporary print newspaper is its accompanying glossy, expensively produced magazine that is almost totally devoid of intellectual content and focused on promoting mindless consumption and narcissism. I haven’t really connected with ‘Bling’, but gather it has something to do with being a rich idiot, or maybe just an idiot. Then there’s the obsession with trivial celebrity that means the only interesting and substantial human beings we can meet in the daily rag at breakfast are in the obituaries, which is obviously limiting when it comes to extending one’s acquaintance. Are editors right? Has the broader public lost interest in anything beyond dogmatic ‘opinion’ and ‘gossip over the back fence’ about the self-serving and the banal? It’s obvious that there has been a major and rapid fall-off in both the volume of science-based content in daily newspapers and in the integrity of daily reporting about science. Serious science journalists – and, I fear, investigative reporters in general – are an endangered species. Clearly, they will not be permitted to highlight any science that might, for example, threaten the interests of a major advertiser. The same is, of course, true for

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Foreword

the commercial visual media. That’s why it is essential to protect public broadcasting services such as the ABC and the BBC. In Australia, we’ve lost The Bulletin, though we have quality formats in The Monthly, The Griffith REVIEW, Australian Geographic, Cosmos, Australasian Science and the New Scientist that carry at least some science content for enlightened, popular consumption. These tend, though, to have a very limited distribution and, at least for the science magazines, the question is whether they preach only to the committed. The best hope is that kids will read them and be influenced towards a worldview that’s based on evidence and investigation rather than trivial opinion and fantasy. Not that fantasy is all bad, of course: Harry Potter did an extraordinary job of promoting books and reading to young people. There’s also the issue that, while the expansion of self-publishing, possibly (though by no means invariably) via electronic formats ‘democratises’ all forms of writing, the absence of serious editorial scrutiny and peer review can also lead to some spectacularly bad and dishonest science books. We’ve seen that in the climate science space, where it seems that many read (or buy, which is not the same thing) to reinforce their prejudices rather than to be informed. A lack of editing can, however, have one fortunate effect: some of the more dreadful examples are so prolix and obscure that they oscillate between the ludicrous and the impenetrable. That’s why, I believe, good, well-researched books that look at particular issues in depth, and anthologies of science writing, are more and more important. The great thing about a book is that it endures and, even if it is long out of print, can turn up in second-hand bookstores, on a side table in a rented beach house, or be found by a young person browsing the shelves at home or in a library. On vacation, I recently picked up Philip Law’s 1983 book Antarctic Odyssey, which deals with the early days (from

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1947) of the Australian Antarctic Research Expeditions, when Law was the ANARE Director. I heard him speak once a few years back, and recall being amazed at the energy and clarity of mind of one who, even then, was very frail and elderly. Law died last year, aged 97. His book lives on and illuminates a whole courageous and important aspect of our scientific history, told from a typically modest and totally Australian perspective. While some have been arguing that books will ultimately disappear, this will clearly not be the case for science. Whether published electronically or as hard copy there is, I think, a substantial market for readable, interesting and comprehensive treatments of serious, science-based issues. While TV nature spectaculars like those presented by Richard Attenborough can be very successful at getting visual messages about science across, there’s still no substitute for a book that allows us to go back over the discussion at any place and time. One other thing we clearly need is more good science stories and science-based fiction for children and adolescents. I wish I had a talent for fiction, and would suggest to any young scientist who can write that this is a very worthwhile goal. As a professional investigator, much of my life has been spent writing scientific literature, the sort of stuff that can be accessed via Google and PubMed. The kind or writing that should teach us to be concise, logical and emotionally bullet-proof to the critiques of anonymous reviewers and tough-minded editors. Like the practice of science itself, the harsh discipline of ‘publish or perish’ for data-based research papers and scientific reviews has ‘just do it’ as a central theme. Losing some succinctness can allow that style to morph into writing non-fiction for a broader audience, but it may be the worst training in the world for fiction. My one attempt at a novel lies (probably forever) in the traditional bottom drawer. Which raises a question: the scientific literature is vast, but

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Foreword

where (excluding science fiction) is the contemporary, imaginative literature of science? Setting aside the ‘end of the world as we know it’ stuff, the various mystery writers who have a forensic pathologist as a central character, Allegra Goodman’s Intuition (about a biomedical research lab) and the terminally despicable Nobel Prize-winning physicist in Ian MacEwan’s Solar, intelligent fiction that features real science and scientists who are believable human beings seems to have declined since the days of Sinclair Lewis, Aldous Huxley and C.P. Snow. There was Michael Crichton, but he made a living out of being hostile to contemporary science. Great science is a fundamentally honourable activity that transforms our reality and is about curiosity, innovation, discovery and insight. Are scientists themselves uninteresting? While some can come across as pitiless bores when put in front of a broader audience, others are wonderful communicators and intriguing people to boot. In the United States, at least, there is a continuing fascination with the flamboyant personality of the late Richard Feynman, the Nobel physicist who was in every way more appealing than MacEwan’s imagined monster. A few of the leading science journals, such as Neurology and Nature, now run short fiction pieces, a bit like one or two of the more fanciful pieces included here. Maybe we need annual prizes for the best science-based short story and novel. Vignettes can be fascinating, whether nonfiction or fiction, and collecting those pieces of writing in an anthology is a good place to start.

f Fiction p. 28 Scientist writers p. 208 Nobel Laureates p. 158

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Introduction: Specimen hunting Stephen Pincock

In the good old days, science was simple. A chap of independent means who fancied getting involved in this natural philosophy lark could simply avail himself of a pair of sturdy boots, a butterfly net and a servant or two, and stomp off into the jungle to fill a satchel with exotic new species. After a few years of grasping and swatting, sweating and scribbling, our hero would return home, tip his bounty out onto the table and begin sorting iridescent blue beetles from lacewing butterflies. Discoveries would fall like fruit from a tree. Well, perhaps things weren’t exactly like that. But the image of gentleman explorers crashing through the underbrush and revolutionising our view of the natural world is unavoidable for anyone in possession of a passing familiarity with fellows like Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace. And without wishing, in any way, to compare myself with those eminent gentlemen, the exercise of compiling this anthology bears some similarities to what I’ve just described. For the past few months, I’ve been blundering about in the wilds of the print and online media in hunt of that glory of nature: science writing.

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Introduction

It has been a surprising, and pleasingly fruitful, expedition. It turns out we have a healthy ecosystem of science writing out there in the Australian landscape, even if it sometimes exists under quite challenging conditions. The variety has been the most interesting thing. Like those explorers of yore, I have found classifying my discoveries a serious challenge. Science writing ranges from 300-word news stories hiding in the corners of newspaper pages to 10,000 word essays online. It includes hard-core exploration of new findings, descriptions of the process of science, and even philosophising on the place of science in modern culture. I’ve tried here to convey some of that diversity. Science writers sometimes say they have the best job in the world, and when you think that their playground encompasses subjects such as the reasons that stars twinkle, the links between evolution and the Rolling Stones, and the rumbling tune sung by the early universe, how could you argue? Who else gets to visit a zoo enclosure to witness the remarkable process of black rhino IVF, as Deborah Smith did? Or ponder, like Anna Funder, the goings-on inside the minds of the fruit bats ravaging Sydney’s Botanic Gardens? The subjects tackled by the writers herein gathered are certainly varied, but the common denominator is good writing. These articles left me by turns chuckling, mad as hell, and mesmerised by the wonder of the universe we inhabit. Good writing is not limited to a particular style, so why not include both the serious, elegant and important writing of Tim Flannery and snappier stuff like Becky Crew’s genuinely funny riff on the unusual sex lives of male Gulf pipefish? Of course, writing about science needs to do more than simply entertain. You also have to get the science right. British science writer Ian Sample hit the nail on the head in his advice to the aspiring:

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Your job is to produce an article that is correct, clear and fascinating, that raises implications and proper doubts and leaves your readers grateful, whether they are the world’s leading authority on the subject or, more likely, a passer-by who landed on your story by chance.

Writers like Sample are very aware that the scientists they interview have often spent decades studying a particular phenomenon. The journalist’s job is to talk to this guru for a few minutes, grasp enough information to tell the story, and get it down on paper in a way that Jill and Joe Public will find entertaining. Simple? Hardly. But hardly impossible, either, as writers like Elizabeth Finkel demonstrate time and again. Then again, it’s a job that can be made vastly easier if the writer and the scientist are one and the same person. When evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks writes about the evolutionary meaning of rock and roll, he’s writing about the field he knows best. It is for that reason that many of the best science writers are scientists, notwithstanding the mistaken notion that scientists are poor communicators.

q As I was sitting down to write this introduction, news broke that US soldiers had killed Osama bin Laden. Inevitably, given that no picture of the dead man was forthcoming, the internet was almost instantly awash with claims that he was not, in fact, dead. In an attempt to counter these doubts, the White House rolled out the ‘gold standard’ of identification, DNA analysis. And John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, told reporters that the DNA evidence provided ‘99.9 per cent confidence’ that the man they shot in the head really was the Al Qaeda chief. Who would have guessed

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Introduction

that science would creep into one of the biggest news stories in what is turning out to be a remarkable year for news? It probably wasn’t a surprise to many science writers. Scientific topics have become the biggest news stories of our times – whether it’s climate change, bushfires, droughts, nuclear disasters or the looming crisis of peak oil. One of the vital roles of science writing is to help us make sense of these issues, and several of the pieces in this collection address them head-on. Germaine Greer, for example, writes with great passion about the Queensland floods, and does it in a way that shows that she has made a real effort to get her head around the science of weather and climate. Greer’s article appeared in The Guardian. I wish Australian newspapers would give science as much space as The Guardian, or The New York Times, to take another example. Some of the country’s best science writers are employed by the big papers here, but they don’t always get the space they deserve. The science writing community in Australia is small. When I recently checked with the indispensable Australian Science Media Centre, they told me they had 60 specialist science writers on their books. That does not include bloggers, but I have found that some of the best writing about science flourishes online. Especially if you like your writing sharp. Some of the writing in cyberspace is red in tooth and claw, but all the better for it. Ferocious rebuttals of pseudoscience are fun to read, and important. As I’m mentioning the size of the science writing community, I should point out the obvious. As a science writer, editor and sometime publisher myself, I have worked with a number of the writers in this collection in one way or another. I commissioned Bryan Gaensler and Rob Brooks to write the books I have excerpted. I have written for Cosmos, The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald. I interviewed Paul Davies and Tim Flannery for the Financial Times, and so on.

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Nevertheless, I have chosen work only on the basis of one thing: they are all entertaining – excellent, in fact – pieces of writing. In the selection process I was lucky to have the generous help of four eminent scientists: Professors Michael Bird, Ken Hillman, Jeremy Mould and Fiona Wood. A big thank you to them for their assistance.

q People love to read about science because the universe is a wonderful, complex, fascinating place. It’s also a bit scary. Few have captured this idea better than James Jeans, in his 1930 popular science book, The Mysterious Universe. ‘Standing on our microscopic fragment of a grain of sand,’ he wrote, ‘we attempt to discover the nature and purpose of the universe which surrounds our home in space and time. Our first impression is something akin to terror.’ With a good science writer to help guide you, it doesn’t take much for terror to give way to wonder. My son had one of those moments the other day while digging around in the mess of chip packets and school lunch boxes under his seat in the car. He’d been foraging around for a few moments when he came across Dr Karl Kruszelnicki’s book which I had been reading with pleasure while compiling this anthology. Silence ensued for a while, until I heard his voice pipe up. ‘Huh, that’s interesting,’ he said. ‘It turns out that stars twinkle because of movements in our atmosphere.’ Now there’s a successful piece of science writing. After dragging remarkable specimens like Dr Karl out of the jungle, I’m more convinced than ever of the important role science writers have in helping us get to grips with the universe. This anthology is only a small sample of what’s out there, hiding down by the roots of the media tree. Many excellent writers are not included, but I encourage you to strap on your boots and go

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Introduction

looking for them. Those who are included I’ve arranged in no particular order, but at the end of each piece, I have made some suggestions of where to go next, according to subject matter, style and other threads, like a trail of breadcrumbs through the forest. Fortunately, this anthology will be back again next year. It will be part of a substantial new competition for science writing. Anyone who wants to enter should visit www.newsouthpublishing.com for details.

f Philosophising p. 180 Classification p. 17 Jungles p. 126

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Bad hotel Anna Funder

At dusk the bats fly silently over our house in inner Sydney. Unlike birds, which coast through the air without apparent thought or work, the bat’s effort to stay aloft, with each wing-beat going from out wide to almost touching under its heavy body, is visible in the span. When I watch the bats, for reasons I can explain, I always think of David Chalmers, one of the world’s leading philosophers of consciousness. I had the good fortune to sit next to David while watching Cathy Freeman run in the Sydney 2000 Olympics. Strangely, I don’t remember much of Freeman’s race. What I remember is David explaining in layperson’s terms his area of interest, which is philosophy of mind, and, particularly, consciousness: how far is it possible to understand what it is like to be another living thing? ‘What is it like, for instance,’ he said, ‘to see the world as a dog? Or a bat?’ David’s work is at the intersection of neuroscience and philosophy. ‘Surely,’ I said, ‘that is a question for poets and novelists. It is a question for the imagination.’ Maybe so, but the question ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ is at the foundation of late 20th century philosophy of consciousness. In a famous essay of that title, the philosopher Thomas Nagel argued that even if we knew everything about how a bat’s brain

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Bad hotel

works, this knowledge could not render for us the subjective experience of what it is like to be a bat. The conundrum is sometimes expressed like this: Mary is a neuroscientist who doesn’t see in colour – only in black, white and grey. Nevertheless, Mary understands in enormous detail how the brain works to see colour. One day, Mary sees red for the first time. She understands then that all the objective knowledge she had could not give her the subjective experience of seeing red. The most sophisticated understanding of the grey matter and electrical impulses under our skulls can’t render the experience of consciousness. The neuropsychologist Paul Broks puts it this way: ‘When we see the brain, we realise that we are, at one level, no more than meat, on another, no more than fiction.’ The bats that fly over our house are native grey-headed flying foxes, on their way to find nectar, flowers and fruit. Chances are, they are coming from a roost or ‘camp’ in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens a couple of kilometres from here. At the moment, camp numbers are up to more than 22,000. This is causing problems for the trees, for the Botanic Gardens administration and, soon, for our federal environment minister. As I spoke with Tim Entwisle, executive director of the Botanic Gardens Trust, the flying foxes chattered in the trees outside his grand office. Though they ostensibly sleep during the day, Entwisle says, ‘There’s always some activity going on.’ And there’s the rub. As they hang upside down, they jostle for position on a branch, their sharp claws shuffling and scraping off the tree’s bark, its new shoots and leaves. The gardens have lost 18 trees in this way in the last 12 years, some of them precious ancient specimens. ‘From a flying fox’s perspective,’ Entwisle says, ‘this is a great spot in Sydney to fly out from and around the city.’ But from his own, it’s a matter of ‘great concern’. Over the past two years the gardens have allocated the equivalent of two people full-time to write a 500-page report for the minister

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Anna Funder

in order to obtain the approval that’s needed to move the flying foxes, which are a listed vulnerable species, elsewhere. When the problem arose in the 1890s, the director of the gardens invited the shooters’ club in. These days methods of moving them on are more inventive. They aim, as Entwisle puts it, to give the bats a ‘bad hotel experience’. The Botanic Gardens Trust already has permission to attempt to move bats out of particular trees. They have tried hanging plastic bags in the trees and installing a huge, inflatable balloon man, like those seen outside car dealerships, to wave its arms around. They have tried running strobe lights and smearing snake poo on the branches (‘Not,’ the gardens’ public relations spokesperson winced, ‘a pleasant experience for anyone involved.’) What Entwisle proposes now is to play unpleasant music to them at brief intervals at dusk, as they leave, and at dawn, as they return, to encourage them to find a new camp. The music Entwisle wants to play was made by Rodney van der Ree of the Botanic Gardens in Melbourne. It was used successfully there in 2003 to move a large camp of flying foxes 4 kilometres downriver to a national park in Kew. Flying foxes do not use sonar to echo-locate. ‘Their hearing range is remarkably similar to ours,’ says van der Ree. ‘They dislike what we tend to dislike.’ So the CD has noises on it that are ‘loud, grating and obnoxious’. I listened to it. It is the computer-generated din of our civilisation: garbage-tin lids clanging, chainsaws starting up, excavators digging. But, as Peggy Eby explained to me, it is our civilisation that has effectively invited them in. If anyone has a chance of understanding what it is like to be a grey-headed flying fox, it is Eby, who has written her PhD thesis on them and studied them – with radio telemetry and satellite tracking, from Cessna aeroplanes, and for government environment departments – for 20 years. Eby explained that in the 1970s, as inner-city areas were gen-

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Bad hotel

trified, people planted native gardens, hoping to attract native birds. Before that time working-class backyards in Balmain and Paddington had chooks, vegies or weeds. ‘But I am 100 per cent sure,’ Eby says, ‘that no one stopped to think they’d be attracting the flying foxes too.’ The problem seems to be partly the noise, partly the perceived threat of disease (flying foxes can carry the lyssavirus and Hendra virus, though infection directly from a flying fox is extremely rare) and partly cultural. ‘Deeply embedded in our European culture is a fear of creatures of the night,’ she says. ‘People mention vampires.’ (This although the bloodsucking bats are a whole other sort – tiny, echo-locating and Latin American.) Eby will be part of a team monitoring the relocation of the flying foxes, should it go ahead later this year. She tells me she admires them for their intelligence and spatial memory, for their methods of communicating information about flowering events to one another, and for the important role they play in pollination and seed dispersal. At dusk they leave the Botanic Gardens in two streams of flight, which follow linear elements in the landscape. ‘We believe they use them for navigation,’ Eby says. ‘In the bush they usually fly along rivers or creeks. In the city, they use major thoroughfares like Anzac Parade instead. It is a silent, measured progression that can last 20 minutes or more. I have watched people on footpaths, in office blocks, in apartments, in cars, in hotels, in hospitals stop and watch; and I know that just for a moment their imagination shifts.’ On a recent morning my young daughter and I found a flying fox on the footpath outside our neighbour’s place, where a magnificent gum is in flower. The creature was still perfect, with a golden ruffle of fur and a surprisingly pretty face, more like a six-month-old kitten than a fox. My daughter got a stick and stretched its soft wings out wide. ‘Maybe it just got tired,’ she said. Behind us lay a carpet of fuchsia pistils from the gum,

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Anna Funder

which had a look of morning-after disarray, as if it had hosted a party.

f Night time p. 188 Teeth p. 111 Minds p. 46

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Science without a capital S: Battling Grumpy Uncles, Media Tarts and Jurassic Marxists Robyn Williams

Science is one of the few human constructs designed to test its own veracity continuously. There is no point in time at which we all nod, wise men with beards, women with six-figure IQs, and say: ‘That’s settled … next!’ All aspects of scientific inquiry are always under review. But it’s not as simple as that. When I was an ABC cub, in the early 1970s, I was regaled by History Men and Counter-Culturists with the view that Science had lost its capital S. Science was, like everything else, conditional, even if we agreed that most of it was considered settled, more or less: the earth is round, dinosaurs are dead and duodenal ulcers are caused by germs, not stress. Popper did not apply universally. In many fields, not only Freud’s, you couldn’t do experiments to prove or disprove a theory. Powerful interests, the wise men cautioned, governed research; and if the military-industrial complex didn’t like it, it didn’t happen. Accordingly, during the 1970s and 1980s, my colleagues gave science a hard time. I did it in a slightly frivolous manner,

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Robyn Williams

running hoaxes and satires. Norman Swan did it by exposing fraud and duplicity. The late Peter Hunt did it by showing how partial the use of scientific knowledge was in the management of forests and mines. Matt Peacock did it by exposing the horrendous effects of asbestos on human health. Science was another ‘self-perpetuating priesthood’, and to get a fresh idea expressed the old professor had first to die. You might wait for decades. And, finally, in some benighted nations, if the tyrant didn’t like it, the field lapsed: in the 1930s Joseph Stalin had Trofim Lysenko, and crops failed; decades later Thabo Mbeki had Peter Duesberg, and too many people died from AIDS. We wanted our audience to think twice when authority was wheeled in on its throne to pronounce the infallible truth. The Academy wasn’t quite the same as the Vatican, we implied, but there were resemblances. It was often political, always complex. Such is youth. The more I saw of the ‘fringe’, the more annoyed I became by their self-seeking, often deeply anti-intellectual intransigence. While the crystal-stroking, herbalist folk in chunky cardies and ponytails (as Mike Carlton notoriously described them) got massively ripped off, so science itself became more self-critical and professional in the best sense. What worried me was the political naivety. In the 1990s and the present century the world changed dramatically. Yes, there were internets and webs, and almost instant and universal communication. This meant that the longevity of scientific falsities shrank. At least, in academia. But science communicators also flourished, freed up by the new willingness of institutions desperate for funds to maintain profile: they let their boffins speak. Paul Davies, Tim Flannery, Mike Archer, David Suzuki, Jane Goodall, Sylvia Earle, Brian Cox, Stephen Hawking and others became famous. There was plenty of science on TV. It was often over-produced to within a nanometre of its life,

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Science without a capital S

but you got the point. It was there. Science seemed secure, even popular. There were embarrassments, such as the disarray in physics, which couldn’t get its quanta and its relativities in one box, and had to wave red-faced at all that dark stuff – but scientists had a terrific tale to tell about the natural world and were listened to with respect. By 2007 all this had changed. There was no explosive event, no tipping point that anyone noticed. But the consequences have been enormous. It’s as if a thought bomb went off in Dr Who and half the globe’s brains turned to custard. Governments have wobbled, prime ministers (actual and potential) have fallen and the President of the United States is threatened by the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. It is another consequence of the new communication technology, in tandem with the old: say anything you like, tell any lies you fancy, and they can have as much currency as the sayings of any old-fashioned sage. Instantly. Three main areas bore the brunt of the new politics: health, evolution and climate. The journal Nature, shocked, put it this way in March 2010: Climate scientists are on the defensive, knocked off balance by a re-energized community of global-warming deniers who, by dominating the media agenda, are sowing doubts about the fundamental science. Most researchers find themselves completely out of their league in this kind of battle because it’s only superficially about the science. The real goal is to stoke the angry fires of talk radio, cable news, the blogosphere and the like, all of which feed off of contrarian story lines and seldom make the time to assess facts and weigh evidence. Civility, honesty, fact and perspective are irrelevant.

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Robyn Williams

That last line is crucial: ‘Civility, honesty, fact and perspective are irrelevant.’ I have been producing and presenting The Science Show on ABC Radio for 35 years. The change in tone – when civility, honesty, fact and perspective became irrelevant – was chilling. When Ian Plimer’s Heaven and Earth (Connor Court) was about to be published, in 2009, I knew it would make a splash. Accordingly, I sent it to three professors, hoping that one of them would find the time when not up a mountain or locked in committee meetings to record a review. All three were climate experts of high standing. Within days of my deadline all of them suddenly delivered. I decided to put their comments to air, in different programs. One, Kurt Lambeck, then the president of the Australian Academy of Science, appeared on Ockham’s Razor; the other two, David Karoly from the University of Melbourne and Malcolm Walter from the University of New South Wales (an old friend of Plimer’s), on The Science Show. The reviews shredded Heaven and Earth. After they were broadcast I received an email from Plimer demanding airtime for a response. I replied that it wasn’t customary for book reviews to be followed by replies from disgruntled authors but he could have an Ockham’s Razor to himself. ‘Immediately?’ he demanded. ‘Well, no,’ I replied. I was in Corsica, wouldn’t be home for three weeks and our science programs don’t have locums, so they were already pre-recorded. He would have to wait until I returned. A couple of days later Plimer appeared at the Sydney Institute. He announced that the ABC was refusing to have him on. His comments, via the institute’s podcast, went around the world. On my return from Europe I duly recorded his scripted talk. He repeated his main lines from Heaven and Earth debunking

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climate science, ignored the arguments his three critics had presented and attacked the ABC for keeping him from its outlets. Ian Plimer had, however, on the publication of his book, appeared on most of our frontline programs. At length. I was astounded that the man I’d been instrumental in awarding a Eureka Prize to, for his campaign against creationists, was now willing to emulate Rush Limbaugh. He knew what I had promised. He knew the ABC had been generous to him. My concern is about the science. My job is to report what authoritative sources say about the latest, tested evidence. I am past caring what the consequences of that evidence may be, although proof of pixies, faked moon landings or CIA bombings of the World Trade Center would be rather perplexing. If it is credible work, on it goes. I report the latest paper on climate rather like a financial journalist reports the value of the euro. If it’s 58 Australian cents, then so be it. We say so. You’d hardly say it’s 28 cents too often without being sacked. The consequences of misleading the public on matters of fact can be really harmful. But the value of the euro is not absolute. It changes from day to day. It is influenced by arbitrary factors, such as ‘confidence’ or flighty investors. Scientific evidence tries to frame nature: what’s really out there. It builds on immense edifices of previous investigation. It is still conditional, but usually very robust. Until now you dismissed that rigour at your peril. But science in many issues underpins politics. Look at water, rivers, genetic modification, forests, fishing: divisive issues with consequences, with winners and losers. Rather than addressing the issues headon, it is much easier to torpedo the scientists, unused as they are, gentle souls, to brawls on the hustings. So Sarah Palin announces that fruit-fly research is a waste of money. Rush Limbaugh tells his millions of listeners, ‘The four corners of deceit are government, academia, science and media.

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Robyn Williams

Those institutions are now corrupt and exist by virtue of deceit.’ Ray Evans, reviewing Climate: The Counter Consensus by Bob Carter (Stacey International, 2010) in Quadrant magazine, avers on carbon dioxide, warming and the human influence: ‘These two arguments have no evidence to support them. None.’ ‘Death panels’ are conjured by opponents to President Obama’s health Bill, suggesting that the commie systems in the United Kingdom and Canada have triage committees ready to sentence your granny to execution if she is deemed unacceptable for treatment in public hospitals. They even said Stephen Hawking would not be alive today if he lived in England (he does!). This led Professor Lawrence Krauss to write in the Scientific American: The increasingly blatant nature of the nonsense uttered with impunity in public discourse is chilling. Our democratic society is imperilled as much by this as any other single threat, regardless of whether the origins of the nonsense are religious fanaticism, simple ignorance or personal gain.

‘Democratic society is imperilled’: that is what’s at stake. The Deputy Leader of the Opposition, Julie Bishop, had it right when she compared political parties to football teams in conflict. She did not take the next step: politics is about power, not achievement; winning, not legislation; noise, not meaning. Governments here and abroad are paralysed. Programs are in stasis. Debates are stymied by monstrous mendacities. Obama is a Muslim? The Earth is cooling? Medicare kills pensioners? What is happening? Naomi Oreskes and Eric M. Conway suggest that the campaign has been orchestrated by a few thinktanks using techniques of the ‘mad men’ on Madison Avenue, knowing that the scientists’ replies would unfailingly be prolix,

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contorted by pious attempts at fairness and, worst of all, published in journals the public never reads. In Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (Allen & Unwin, 2010), the two academics describe how it was done. Richard Girling summarises it in a review in the Sunday Times: A tiny, unqualified minority, they [the contrarians] succeeded in skewing every debate. By promoting doubt, they persuaded editors that, in the name of ‘balance’, their propaganda deserved equal weight to the painstaking work of independent scientists. Peer-reviewed research was routinely dismissed by the sceptics as ‘junk science’. Perversity and invention were erected in its place. The contrarians are far-right political ideologues who cut their teeth in the Cold War. When the Soviet Bloc collapsed, they looked for a new threat to the free world and found it in the environmental movement. They compare it to a watermelon: green on the outside, red in the middle. For them, regulation is the enemy of the free market, the slippery slope to socialism, which must be blocked at whatever cost … Oreskes and Conway have exposed the lie.

Climate science is replete with uncertainties. No one knows how high temperatures may rise, whether the effects will be drastic or otherwise, and how quickly remediation may work. There is plenty to debate, even before we consider policy options and their consequences. But how do you spot a wilful distorter or his arguments in advance? They are of several types: Grumpy Uncles, Tory Media Tarts, Foaming Shock-Jocks, Jurassic Marxists and the Busted Bitter. They may be combined in assorted ways.

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Robyn Williams

Grumpy Uncles look like Wilson Tuckey on stilts. They have ‘seen it all’ and know that previous millennial warnings came to nothing. Been there … Tory Media Tarts suffer from Attention Deprivation Disorder. Nigel Lawson and a couple of his fellow lords from Thatcher’s time (Christopher Monckton) add a Brideshead Revisited cachet to the list of dissenters. Foaming Shock-Jocks we all know about. The trick is to tell the professional (and sometimes rational) contrarians from the sociopaths who really mean it. Jurassic Marxists feel green politics is a bourgeois push to deprive the world’s poor of the rich comforts we enjoy. The journalist Alexander Cockburn and Martin Durkin (maker of The Great Global Warming Swindle) may be members. The Busted Bitter (and often Twisted) were once supreme in their fields but fell out with their employer – university, media outlet – over money or status. Having recovered from the insult they now fly the world appearing on well-funded platforms with almost anybody knocking ‘government’. If you haven’t spotted which type your interlocutor belongs to, test their argument. Characteristically, the climate sceptic displays the following signs: no level of evidence is ever enough. (You may go back a thousand times and they will always have a blocking tactic.) They invariably are linked to a lobby group, often with powerful political connections: Quadrant, the Institute of Public Affairs, the egregious Senator Fielding (whose combination of creationism and climate doubting seemed not to put Plimer off one bit). They are entirely against anthropogenic global warming – only 100 per cent attitudes are entertained. (Most of us are not 100 per cent either way about anything, except a free drink.) Peer review is an echo chamber of old mates and academies are glorified hospices. The greater the renown of the scientist, the more they will

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be rejected by ‘sceptics’ as authority figures (as I used to do in the 1970s – I recognise the slippery debating trick). Lines are repeated shamelessly, like pollies on a stump speech, despite the arguments and facts having been crushed a hundred times before. If the scientists seem consistent and numerous in making the case on climate, it’s only because they are rabidly chasing the same research dollar. (This can be attached to virtually any finding at any time.) If you find sceptics’ anti-climate tirades in reactionary magazines, free-enterprise thinktanks and the right wing of conservative parties then there’s a chance, just a chance, that it’s ideological. (That they appear hardly anywhere else is, of course, a coincidence or a plot.) There are two final gambits to look for if the above haven’t worked. Look for the overturning of philosopher David Hume’s ideas on causality. Those billiard balls may not rebound tomorrow, despite having done so for the whole of recorded history, and carbon dioxide may fail to have any effect beyond today’s concentration, two centuries of research notwithstanding. Then you can call all the climate scientists and their adherents ‘religious deviants’. As Cardinal George Pell put it: Some of the hysteric and extreme claims about global warming are also a symptom of pagan emptiness, of Western fear when confronted by the immense and basically uncontrollable forces of nature. Belief in a benign God who is master of the universe has a steadying psychological effect, although it is no guarantee of Utopia, no guarantee that the continuing climate and geographic changes will be benign. In the past pagans sacrificed animals and even humans in vain attempts to placate capricious and cruel gods. Today they demand a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.

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Robyn Williams

Any one of these easy-to-administer tests shows up an unblushing sophistry designed to obliterate any climate scientists offering evidence of any kind, hampered as ever by an unawareness of inevitable uncertainty. My job is the pursuit of truth. Or so they tell me. Just as I will look at today’s listing and tell you that the euro is worth 59.5 Australian cents, I will report what is published on climate science in the finest journals or summarised by the top international academies of science, including our own, because it is their function to assess the state of play in a field. It has been my experience that all these sources point in the same direction. Climate is changing, we are responsible and the problem is real. I cannot help what experts say. I am biased towards authority – reliable, proven sources. But I will seek out dissenting voices. Not just because I’m a child of the 1970s and those hirsute counter-cultural renegades, but because the world is a complex place and we need to probe interesting ideas outside the mainstream. Accordingly, our science programs have featured Matt Ridley (a ‘luke-warmist’), Freeman Dyson (a climate critic), Don Aitkin (a sceptic), Nigel Calder (a dissident), Jennifer Marohasy (an indefatigable critic of greens) and the more conspicuous sceptics from within science itself. A broadcaster must engage with unfashionable ideas. These may prove to be, as were the claims of Vaclav Havel and others antagonistic to socialist ‘truth’, dead right in another age. There are only a limited number of occasions on which you can have a fellow saying the same thing, pushing the line of the lobby. We do not, in the programs I present, feature Greenpeace or the Australian Conservation Foundation or the anti-GM groups (or very rarely); we also try to avoid Institute of Public Affairs and Heartland Institute spokesmen (though some of our ‘sceptics’ are paid by them, or have been). Such are the complexities. Such are the trials of science in

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public. Lord Robert May, the Australian who became both president of the Royal Society of London and Britain’s chief scientist, warned ten years ago that this would be the ‘Century of Uncertainty’. He wrote: Pockets of aberrant opinion may hold out, with proponents either ignoring decisive evidence and experiments, or alternatively inventing ever more baroque ways of modifying their views to accommodate facts … It is important, although often difficult, at each stage in the evolution of such a landscape to maintain a clear sense of its geomorphology. Unfortunately, the media’s praiseworthy aim of always presenting a ‘balanced’ account can have difficulty tracking such an evolving landscape. The temptation, whether in print, radio or TV, is to present the ‘two sides’, as if reporting a sporting event.

For those of us in broadcasting it has become trickier than ever. Democracy has, in the past two years, resembled a sporting event – one without an outcome and with too much brawling. We should remember previous eras with similar turbulence, when lies – often big ones – became easy to tell. It is likely that the stakes, both politically and environmentally, are as high today as they were then. Let us try to ensure that the sons and daughters of Goebbels do not end up creating a world as ghastly as it was when I was born.

f Jurassic p. 126 Climate p. 148 Polemic p. 1

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You should probably just move oceans, male Gulf pipefish Becky Crew

It’s well known within seahorse circles that it’s the males who bear the responsibility of pregnancy, not the females. The same goes for their relatives, the pipefish, whose males are equipped with a specialised external brood pouch into which the females will deposit eggs during copulation. But a recent examination of pipefish male pregnancy and mate selection by Kimberley Paczolt and Adam Jones from Texas A&M University has found that this process is nothing to coo over. Henry Gee, Senior Editor at Nature, described it as ‘sinister’. Observing the reproductive behaviour of 22 captive male Gulf pipefish (Syngnathus scovelli), a small-mouthed, pencilshaped species with a relatively poor swimming technique, Paczolt and Jones discovered just how much control the males have over their prospective progeny. By pairing the males with either large or small females, the researchers found that that the males wasted no time in mating with larger, more attractive females, but were significantly less eager when paired with smaller females. They also found that the eggs deposited by larger females had a much higher rate of survival to the point of birth, with the males selectively aborting those from a less attractive partner by either

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Male Gulf pipefish

retaining vital nutrients, or absorbing (that is, cannibalising) the embryos. By also looking at successive pregnancies in male pipefish, the team were able to make sense of these rather callous tendencies. Not only did broods from smaller females have a low survival rate to begin with, but if a male first mates with an attractive female and bears a large brood, he’s unlikely to want to invest more resources into a subsequent pregnancy, particularly from a less attractive partner. Instead of nurturing these potential offspring, his specially evolved brood pouch allows him to retain or absorb the nutrients to ready himself for the possibility of meeting a more attractive mate. ‘When a male mates with a female that is not necessarily all that “attractive”, instead of investing a lot in those offspring, he’s recharging for the next pregnancy – at least this is what our results suggest,’ Dr Jones reports. That the male pipefish are actively trying to control the quality of their offspring during pregnancy is evidence of postcopulatory sexual selection, which follows the initial competition for mates by way of combat and elaborate courtship displays. Dr Jones explains: When Darwin proposed the theory of sexual selection, he dealt entirely with pre-mating sexual selection … But after mating there are things that happen within the female’s reproductive tract or competition among sperm from different males that also result in sexual selection. So it turns out that post-mating sexual selection has hardly been studied at all in these sex role-reversed species.

Well, Gulf pipefish boys, you might think this is all pretty great, being able to pick and choose (and cannibalise) your own progeny with nary a qualm in the world. But the thing is, those ugly pipefish girls you mated with in the past, they’re not just going

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Becky Crew

to disappear. The ocean might be big, but it’s not that big, and you know what they say – ‘Mate with one ugly pipefish that time you had nine vodkas, three gins and no dinner, and you’ll end up with six months of whiny text messages and a lifetime of really awkward encounters whenever you try and go back to that particular bar because they happen to serve $5 spirits till 1am.’ So you’ll decide to brave said bar one night, all, ‘Five tequila sunrises, please. Yes, I’m serious. Oh. Hi …’ And that unattractive pipefish girl you once mated with, let’s call her … Martin, will be like, ‘OMG, I haven’t seen you in ages. How are the offspring?’ ‘Huh?’ ‘You know, the offspring. Our offspring?’ ‘Oh. Umm. Hmm.’ ‘You ate them, didn’t you?’ ‘Well technically I absorbed … Shit. Five more tequila sunrises please.’ But it won’t end there, Gulf pipefish boys, with you simultaneously drinking and wearing a good deal of very cheap alcohol and orange juice, because everyone will know about that time you mated with Martin, especially her really short and ugly friends, and they’ll look at her and then at you and then back at her and figure they’ve got a shot. So you’ll be at a completely different bar, trying to chat up some cute pipefish girl who really likes the internet and stuff, like, ‘I aborted a brood twenty hoping to meet someone so … long. How many millimetres are you, anyway? A hundred and twenty? Hundred and thirty? Wait right there, I’m going to get you a vat of gin.’ ‘And a Redbull.’ ‘And a Redbull. Right.’ But you’ll only get halfway to the bar before a bunch of Martin’s short and ugly friends swarm and engulf you, all, ‘Hey, can

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Male Gulf pipefish

I buy you a drink?’ ‘No thanks.’ ‘You want my number? I might be only ninety-five millimetres, but I sure know how to use them…’ ‘Ew. No thanks.’ ‘Hey, can I buy you a drink?’ And meanwhile the cute pipefish girl who really likes the internet and stuff will fully think you’re into ugly chicks or something and clear off without her vat of gin, or Redbull, and you’ll either have to go home alone, or pick one of the short and ugly pipefish girls to take with you, like, ‘All right, fine. You. What’s your name? Brian? Yeah okay, whatever, come on.’ And you thought having a brood pouch would be a riot, Gulf pipefish boys.

f Blogs p. 183 Sex p. 62 Water p. 106

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The trouble with genes Elizabeth Finkel

‘What’s a gene, Dad?’ I’d like to be there when the nine-year-old son of iconoclastic geneticist John Mattick pops the question. It used to be simple – a gene coded for a protein. But when I put that question to Mattick, based at the University of Queensland, his response was as disturbing as it was confusing: ‘Genetic information is multilayered and a gene can convey lots of different information into the system. It’s almost like we’ve moved into hyperspace in terms of information coding and transfer.’ Mattick’s cutting-edge theories about gene regulation have been published in the British journal Nature and even appeared in The New York Times. Yet, even though I was once a geneticist, I couldn’t fathom his answer. It seemed my fears had been realised and I’d been left behind by the genetics revolution. In a desperate ploy to catch up, I asked how he would explain a gene to his young son. He retorted: ‘I would just tell him, “it’s an old-fashioned concept”, and then explain about information networks. He’s a child of the digital generation – he won’t have any trouble with it.’ It’s not just me who’s confused. I checked the 2008 edition of my favourite textbook, Molecular Biology of the Cell. The traditional definition is still there in the opening chapter. But as you

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The trouble with genes

read on, you sense the textbook struggling, trying to wrestle the gene back into the box of a definition. Mattick prefers not to try. And a lot of other geneticists are starting to think this way too. As Ed Weiss, at the University of Pennsylvania told me, ‘The concept of a gene is shredding.’

q The genomics revolution is largely to blame. Scientists were shocked when they found out how few ‘old-fashioned’ genes we actually have – about the same number as the humble nematode worm (Caenorhabditis elegans). In fact, almost all multicellular creatures with the complexity of a worm or greater have about 20,000 genes. But for Mattick, the death knell of the traditional concept of the gene was triggered by another revolution altogether – that of the digital information age. Scientists have always understood biology in terms of the technology of the day. The brain, for instance, was considered by the Ancient Greeks and Romans to be an aqueduct for pumping blood; inhabitants of the 19th century likened it to a telephone exchange; those of the 20th century likened it a personal computer. Now scientists compare the brain to chaos and distributed functions of the internet. When it comes to the gene, Mattick likes to point out that scientists cracked its code in the 1950s, when the world was purely analogue. We had vinyl records, slide rules and mechanical cars. We were primed to recognise the gene as a recipe for an analogue device – such as a protein, for instance. Proteins are the analogue devices that operate the chemistry of life: the enzymes that metabolise food; the mortar and bricks of tissues; the motors of muscles; the hormones that transmit signals; and the ferries that carry oxygen through blood. We recognised a gene as being the recipe for a protein. Today, iPods store the equivalent of many thousands of vinyl

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Elizabeth Finkel

records. Microprocessors in cars can control everything from the engine to the stereo. The digital revolution has succeeded in taking vast amounts of information and compressing it. Mattick believes something very similar happened to the gene. In the course of evolution, it went digital. In 1953 we got our first inkling of how genes work. Scientists knew that genetic information was carried by the threadlike molecule DNA – a polymer of four repeating molecules: adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine, or A, T, C and G. But how did this thread carry genetic information? Perhaps a picture would reveal its secret. British crystallographers Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins bombarded crystals of DNA with X-rays and observed an enigmatic regular structure. The University of Cambridge’s James Watson and Francis Crick figured out what it was. Like the elegant spiral staircase of the Louvre in Paris, it was a double helix. And the moment they figured out the structure, the secret of life was revealed. Life copied itself by splitting the helical ladder down the middle. Each half then became a template for generating a new copy, because each DNA letter on the split rung specified what its partner must be: A only paired with T; C would link only with G. Watson and Crick had figured out how the code of life copies itself. Some five years later, Marshall Nirenberg, Har Gobind Khorana and Robert Holley in the United States figured out what the code means. The letters of DNA spelt words that coded for amino acids – the building blocks of proteins. Until then scientists had been kids pulling Tinkertoys apart, but now they had the instructions for assembling them. Mankind had discovered the awe-inspiring logic of life. Genes were made up of a string of DNA, and DNA coded for proteins. DNA happened to have a go-between, a disposable working copy called ‘messenger RNA’. RNA was chemically similar to DNA, but flimsier. Just as an

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architect will run off copies of a blueprint, so messenger RNA was the working copy used on the protein construction site.

q Having cracked the secret of life, these scientists now started calling themselves molecular biologists (biologists who studied living molecules). And they became rather sanguine, so sanguine that they started talking about dogmas. ‘We had two central dogmas that were regarded as universal truths in the ’60s,’ said geneticist Bob Williamson, now an emeritus professor at the University of Melbourne. ‘The first was “DNA made RNA made protein.” The second was that the genetic code was universal: what was true for E. coli would be true for an elephant.’ The shock to the system came in 1977. Researchers by now were quite au fait with genetic code. Thanks to its universality, they could insert the predicted DNA code for a human gene into a bacterium and out would pop the correct protein. Yet no one had ever glimpsed the ‘mother code’ of a human gene. It was packaged in a chromosome within the dark nucleus of the cell, like a hallowed tome in the crypt of the Vatican library. In 1977, researchers decided to fish out the mother code for the gene that makes globin (a component of haemoglobin). But no one was prepared for its size – the globin gene was way larger than it ought to have been. Williamson, whose group at St Mary’s Hospital in London was the first to put the human globin gene into bacteria, remarked in a Nature editorial: ‘Once again we are surprised.’ The explanation was bizarre. The mother gene did indeed carry the predicted code for globin, but it was interspersed with gibberish. For instance, imagine that the predicted DNA code for globin was written with the English letters: G-L-O-B-I-N. The mother code appeared as: G-L-z-z-z-q-q-O-B-s-r-m-b-I-N. Researchers panicked. What was this gibberish? Was the genetic

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Elizabeth Finkel

code not universal after all? But the panic soon subsided. Whatever gibberish had infiltrated the mother code, it disappeared from the working copy – the messenger RNA – by the time it got to the factory floor. Like an edited home video, the internal junk had been clipped out and the good bits spliced back together again. Indeed, the process was dubbed ‘splicing’. The bits that were spliced together were named ‘exons’; the internal junk, ‘introns’. With everything neatly named and explained, ‘the world collectively breathed a sigh of relief ’, says Mattick. The hallowed central dogma had been saved. There were lots of justifications for dismissing junk DNA as ‘junk’. Not only did it lack code words for amino acids; it turned out 50 per cent of the junk was comprised of inane repetition. These repetitious tracts seemed meaningless. But researchers had a good notion of what many of them were. Most of the repeats were ‘transposons’ or ‘jumping genes’. Jumping genes, which may have originated from invading viruses, have the ability to copy themselves independently of the rest of the genome and then become inserted randomly throughout the genome. Then there was another reason to suspect that much of the DNA of a species was junk. The total amount of DNA seemed to bear very little relationship to the complexity of the organism. An amoeba, for instance, had a thousand times more DNA than a human. Sometimes it seemed cells multiplied, but forgot to divide, ending up with vast amounts of DNA. It seemed as though DNA just liked to go along for the ride.

q Not everyone dismissed junk DNA. Physicists such as Eugene Stanley at Boston University looked for patterns in junk DNA and found long-range interactions more typical of language than gibberish. Malcolm Simons, a Melbourne immunologist,

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stumbled upon junk DNA in the course of testing people’s tissue types. Tissue compatibility depends on MHC genes, as do some aspects of immunity. Yet he found the pattern of junk DNA surrounding the genes was a better predictor of the tissue type. For him, junk turned to treasure. Mattick’s departure from the dogma seems to have been driven more by instinct than evidence. Blame it on his genes: ‘I’ve got a natural tendency to challenge everything because of my Irish background,’ he says. Mattick recalls sitting in a pub in 1977 during his postdoctoral stint at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and thinking ‘Maybe this is telling us something.’ But for 16 years, while he built his career as a bacterial geneticist, the problem of junk remained an ‘intellectual hobby’. In 1993, Mattick felt he deserved a break. He’d completed the Herculean task of setting up an entire new institute from scratch – the Institute of Molecular Biosciences at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. What better reward than to spend a sabbatical at the University of Cambridge scratching his intellectual itch? He had slowly been building a theory in which RNA was central. The current dogma said that most of the RNA made by the genome, the RNA from introns, was bound for the scrap heap. But Mattick thought otherwise. Simple organisms such as bacteria do not carry introns, but complex creatures do. Mattick wondered if the scrap RNA was part and parcel of that complexity. After all, RNA has amazing versatility: it is a code-carrying molecule that can recognise matching codes on both DNA and other bits of RNA. And it can also form extraordinary threedimensional structures to mesh with proteins. In Mattick’s theory, the scrap RNA – or ‘non-coding’ RNA, as it became called – was not flotsam and jetsam floating on a sea of junk DNA. Rather, this scrap was more akin to the optical

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Elizabeth Finkel

fibres of a modern high-rise building. An 18th century time traveller, spying these cables, might pass them off as scrap compared with the recognisable analogue components of the building such as bathrooms, kitchens and bedrooms. Yet, just as the cables are crucial for the building’s communications and controls, so scrap RNA is crucial to the communications and control of a multicellular organism. The major problem with his theory was that there was no experiment to prove it right or wrong. So Mattick decided to spend his sabbatical in the library looking for ‘circumstantial evidence’. What he searched for with the most alacrity was evidence to prove him wrong. ‘The critical observations were the ones that would show it was bunk. Then I could just return to my lab and forget about all this stuff.’ Two bits of evidence threatened to abruptly end his quest. One was fugu – the pufferfish (Diodon). Fugu is famous for the tetrodotoxin which kills dozens of Japanese diners each year and for its tiny genome – about an eighth the size of our own. Nobel Prize winner Sydney Brenner, then at the British Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, was in the process of reading fugu’s DNA sequence. Rumour was the fish had barely any introns, and if a complex vertebrate such as fugu had no introns, then Mattick’s theory about regulatory RNA must be wrong. He paid a visit to Brenner to discover the terrible truth. It turned out that while most of fugu’s introns were very small, some were really big. Mattick’s theory survived. The next mortal threat was a publication reporting that introns, once clipped out of the messenger RNA, were destroyed within seconds. If introns were as ephemeral as a puff of smoke, how could they perform any function? Mattick scrutinised the report closely. It showed that introns were edited out of the main message within seconds. But as to how long they persisted before

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being shredded, no one knew. Perhaps, he speculated, it was long enough to do something. Mattick, of course, was also on the lookout for evidence that would support his theory. He found some. The fruit fly possessed a set of genes that were responsible for its body plan, known as the bithorax complex. It turned out that a crucial stretch of this DNA produced RNA that did not code for protein. What other function might this RNA have?

q Mattick returned to the University of Queensland with his theory intact. He started writing papers articulating his theory that non-coding RNA (shorthand for non-protein coding RNA) was the high-level coding language of complex organisms. His approach remained one of gathering circumstantial evidence. Together with co-workers in mathematics and computer science, he amassed some compelling observations. For instance, as more and more species became the darlings of DNA sequencing projects, Mattick noticed a delectable relationship: there was no link between the complexity of the critter and its total amount of DNA, but there was a clear relationship between the proportions of junk and protein-coding DNA: as the complexity of the organism increased, so did the relative amount of junk. And then genome sequencing delivered the pièce de résistance: making a human being required no more old-fashioned genes than making a worm or fly. Clearly complexity was encoded elsewhere, and according to Mattick and a growing number of converts, it was in non-coding RNA. Mattick’s genetic programming theory, outlined in a recent edition of the Annals of the New York Academy of Science, started to assume its current form. In simple terms it goes like this: bacteria could make do with using analogue devices – proteins. But even these single-celled critters devoted a large portion of their

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Elizabeth Finkel

genetic information to the task of control. If organisms were going to get more complex and coordinate decisions between trillions of cells, they needed to develop a more compact regulatory language. Just as engineers turned to digital coding to move from LPs to iPods, biological systems turned to RNA to evolve from bacteria to people. According to Mattick, RNA, like DNA, carries coded digital information in four letters that can rapidly interact with other parts of the code, much like the self-modifying or feedforward routines of some computer programs.

q As Mattick was building the framework of his model, the rest of the world started providing the bricks and mortar. Big time. Since 1993, there has been an avalanche of evidence on the surprising roles of non-coding RNA. Most of our DNA may well have originated as ‘junk’ but that junk has been put to work. One of its most common jobs is to produce tiny bits of RNA – known as ‘microRNA’ – that target other RNA for destruction. MicroRNA has been shown to shut down the activity of protein-coding RNA in everything from petunias to people. Junk DNA also plays another crucial function: it guards the DNA code from invasion by retroviruses or so-called jumping genes, which can hop about in the genome causing dangerous mutations. Junk DNA is itself largely composed of former interlopers, but like a patriotic immigrant, it does its best to prevent any further invasions. The RNA transcripts that run off junk DNA are still a close match to live viruses or active jumping genes, and if these junk transcripts meet up with their relatives, they inactivate them. Junk DNA may play an even more profound role in the workings of multicellular animals. A crucial part of being multi-

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cellular is that different cells do different things – they are not all reading from the same page of the genome hymn book. The first step towards specialisation is folding down those pages that are not to be read, and it seems junk DNA guides the folding process. For instance, females carry two X chromosomes, but only read the contents of one. During embryonic development, one of the X chromosomes is folded away, a process initiated by a large string of non-coding RNA called ‘Xist’. While most tissues of the body want to keep jumping genes from jumping, the brain might have other ideas. Fred Gage’s lab at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, found evidence that jumping genes known as ‘LINE-1’ or ‘L1’, which are permanently deactivated in other cells, become active during development of the human brain. The L1 genes replicate and insert randomly, sometimes creating as many as 100 extra copies per cell. This variation among neurons in our brains could be the basis for individual differences in neural circuitry and may open up a new way of looking at neurological disorders. Junk may also have played a crucial role in our evolution. At the DNA level, one of the things that distinguishes primates from other mammals is the invasion of a million copies of a jumping gene that goes by the name of ‘alu’. It now occupies 10.5 per cent of the human genome. Junk RNA may also account for some of the differences between humans and chimps. Our DNA is 99 per cent similar, but one of the regions that differs is the so-called HAR1, or human accelerated region 1. It turns out HAR1 produces an 118-letter non-coding RNA which is highly active in the brain.

q In 2005, Mattick resigned as director of his institute and went back to work in the lab. Tools to explore the function of noncoding RNA had arrived, in the form of heavy-duty sequencing

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Elizabeth Finkel

machines. In just one week a ‘next generation’ sequencing machine can read three billion letters – the equivalent of an entire human genome. Not long ago, that task took the combined forces of the Human Genome Project 14 years to complete. Mattick and University of Queensland colleague Sean Grimmond have been in collaboration with like minds at Japan’s RIKEN Institute. They have been scouring the output of mouse and human genomes, trying to put together a comprehensive catalogue of their RNA output. The database called ‘Fantom’ (functional annotation of mammalian genomes) now contains millions of transcripts. The latest data is mind boggling. As Grimmond tells me: ‘Each gene is capable of seven different transcripts; some of these code for proteins and some don’t.’ Trying to make sense of this deluge is the challenge. ‘[But] we’re getting good at asking questions about ludicrous amounts of data,’ he says. For Mattick, the human genome is an RNA machine. But is his theory well and truly vindicated? Not yet. Though it would be hard to find anyone today who blithely dismisses junk DNA, few are willing to go as far as he is and say that the RNA read from junk code is the software that controls a complex organism. For example, Claude Desplan at New York University has studied fruit fly development for 25 years and argues that complex genomes, in flies or people, are still fundamentally controlled by proteins. While acknowledging that some junk has a role he says, ‘most of junk DNA is still junk’. Mattick, though, is convinced that our genome is way ahead of anything that IT designers have yet imagined. ‘The genome is so sophisticated that there are lessons in information storage and transmission that will be really useful’ once we figure it out, he tells me. ‘The human genome is a similar size to Microsoft Word, but it makes a human that walks and talks.’ Notwithstanding the deluge of papers he has authored in top

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journals, Mattick still seems to be on the fringe. And you get the impression that’s just where he likes to be.

f Genes p. 98 Queensland p. 141 Junk p. 122

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There is no mercury in vaccines Deb Hodgkin

You’ll have to indulge me a little here, but ‘elements and compounds’ is Year 7 or 8 science so this is a class I teach pretty much every year. I’ll actually avoid mercury and vaccines until the end, and start by telling you a little story … Chlorine is a highly poisonous gas. It was used in 1915 to devastating effect on soldiers in Ypres. It is a pale yellow–green and smells terrible, so it’s pretty noticeable. Sodium is a soft, silvery metal that is extremely reactive in water – it has to be stored under oil because it will react with the water in the air. It gets so hot it is molten and will burst into flame – it is even worse with acids such as vinegar, and reacts explosively. So you would expect that these two chemicals, which are very dangerous, must be handled with caution. You would think that a substance with both of them in it would be hazardous and treated with the utmost care. Introducing sodium chloride, this most dangerous of chemicals. It is made up of one chloride ion bonded to one sodium ion and forms a crystalline white solid. You’re probably familiar with it. In fact it’s almost certainly in your kitchen right now. Because it’s salt. Common table salt. If we were to go by the elemental

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There is no mercury in vaccines

properties, this would be far too dangerous to have anywhere near us. It would be poisonous and explosive (especially with acids). But we all know it isn’t. And that’s why there has never been mercury in vaccines. There used to be a preservative called thiomersal (or thimerosal in the United States) that contained mercury as part of a compound. But the properties of a compound have nothing to do with the properties of the elements that make it up. The fact that it has an atom of mercury bonded to the other atoms of sodium (Aaaaargh!), sulphur (oh dear), oxygen (burns), carbon and hydrogen (explosive in the presence of oxygen) is completely irrelevant when working out whether or not it is dangerous. You might as well say it is flammable because it contains hydrogen and oxygen, but then water would be as well, and we don’t get all upset about that. As it happens, thiomersal has been removed from all the vaccines in the childhood schedule anyway (in Australia – I can’t speak for the rest of the world); it is used during manufacture to kill bacteria, but not in the final product. This isn’t to say that thiomersal is as safe as water (and it doesn’t matter anyway, because it isn’t in there). What it is saying is that thiomersal, and every other ingredient of a vaccine, needs to be evaluated on its own properties, not those of mercury or whatever other atoms happen to be in it. Otherwise you would need to be wary of poison gas when cooking, and stay well away from salt and vinegar chips – they might explode.

f Blogs p. 158 Kids p. 118 Explosions p. 162

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Is your brain making you fat? Michael Cowley

Spend enough time in public places or even watching television and it’s clear that people are becoming more overweight. Indeed rates of obesity are rising in both adults and children. But the average adult’s weight increases by less than 500 grams a year – the equivalent of just a few potato chips a day. This demonstrates the remarkable job our bodies do of balancing our food intake and energy output. So for those of us whose waistlines are expanding – what’s going wrong? And are we solely to blame? The recent increase in the amount of fat in our bodies is due to dramatic changes in our lifestyle over the past 100 years or so – a change we’re not equipped to deal with from an evolutionary perspective. For many people, physical effort has become optional, and with the increasing availability of energy-rich, tasty foods, in larger and larger portions, we’ve created a ‘crisis of plenty’ in our pantries and refrigerators. So we are pushing ourselves to gain weight on both sides of the energy balance. And our bodies are all in favour of that. In evolutionary terms, it’s good to put on weight. We need energy stores to carry out activities that use lots of energy, like growing and repairing muscle, as well as carrying pregnancies, and raising children – and historically, food supplies weren’t

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Is your brain making you fat?

always a given. Our brains developed ways to maintain our fat stores by detecting the levels of a hormone called leptin, which is secreted into the blood by fat cells. The brain mostly tries to keep this hormone level constant, by making us hungry and burn less energy when our leptin levels drop. It’s an effective system for people whose lives depend on having reserves of energy to survive famine, but for those of us battling obesity in a time of plenty it has some serious downfalls. For starters, leptin makes it difficult for most of us to lose weight easily through dieting. When we diet, leptin levels drop rapidly. The brain notices this decline and triggers strong hunger, and also makes us burn less energy, trying to preserve body fat – effectively counteracting the diet. On top of the diet dilemma, obesity itself interferes with the brain’s regulatory system. It seems that the high levels of leptin from excess body fat makes the brain leptin-resistant, and less able to detect levels of stored fat. The brain actually gets tricked into thinking we are leaner than we really are – so too much fat seems to reprogram the brain into thinking we’re starved. Leptin aside, there’s another factor working to increase body weight for some obese people – compulsive food consumption mirrors drug addiction. Recent brain imaging studies have shown that addictive drugs activate a set of ‘reward’ pathways in the brain. These brain systems seem to tell the brain that something is very important, and are usually activated by things that are essential for survival. Addictive drugs highjack these brain pathways. For some obese people, food also activates these pathways, so we could say that food has characteristics of an addiction. While it seems like a flawed system, our body fat regulation evolved under pressure to cope with too little food. In our evolutionary past we haven’t really needed to evolve ways to deal with too much fat – it hasn’t happened often enough to have been a burden to survival. But while our lifestyle has changed, our

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Michael Cowley

brains haven’t yet caught up: they’re still operating as if we’re living in times of regular famine. However, not everyone becomes obese in our current foodrich environment, so it’s clear that individuals have different tendencies to become overweight or obese. This suggests that the high rates of obesity present today are due to an interaction between our genetic predisposition and our environment. While a number of individual genes have been shown to cause obesity, it is unlikely that these gene mutations alone are responsible for the current rising rates of obesity. What’s likely to have a bigger impact on our tendency to gain weight is our recent evolutionary history. Although all humans share a common ancient ancestry, our recent evolutionary histories differ depending on where our recent ancestors lived. For example, some people come from places where the environments were less productive, or where the food supply was less reliable. They have evolved a ‘thrifty’ genotype that enables them to thrive with periodic low food availability: they store food efficiently when they can, to prepare for a possible future famine. This is a really good adaptation when there is regular famine, but with most of us in the developed world trying to decrease our food consumption, what was once an evolutionary advantage now causes increased risks. Our different genetic histories also show up in the way that some people can become obese and not become unwell, while for others a moderate increase in weight can bring on serious disease. Evolutionary biologist Professor Jared Diamond has pointed out that the relative abundance of food in Europe for many hundreds of years might have created conditions that would have allowed someone to become obese if they were determined to overeat and not exercise. He suggests that there may have been a selective pressure in Europe to develop resistance to obesity, and obesity-induced

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Is your brain making you fat?

diseases. If this is correct then we might, sadly, discover that as people from non-European backgrounds become more affluent and more obese, they will have even higher prevalence of diabetes and heart disease. Our understanding of the pathways in the brain that sense stored fat, stomach contents and blood sugar has helped us understand obesity and how it contributes to diabetes and heart disease, and has led to the development of several new drug therapies. But we cannot wait for magic bullets to help us lose weight. We have a responsibility to ourselves and our children to develop ways of living that incorporate better eating habits and more active lifestyles, to make vigorous activity part of our day, not a special occasion.

f Being human p. 50 Evolution p. 126 Food p. 122

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It’s time to talk Kate Legge

One morning last November, a teenage schoolboy leapt in front of a city-bound train as it hurtled towards Cheltenham station in Victoria’s bayside suburbs. There was no mention of his death in the media. If he had drowned in a swollen river on a Duke of Edinburgh hike, or been killed in a level-crossing accident, there would have been headlines, perhaps heated talkback radio debate over inadequate supervision and safety precautions. His school newsletter made brief mention of the ‘tragic event’ – a euphemism often applied to suicide – in amongst cheerier references to speech nights, sporting victories and academic merits. Compare the silence that shrouded this boy’s death with the publicity given to teenager Luke Robinson’s fatal collision when his car sped out of control on a country road last March. Victorians knew his fate intimately, thanks to a statewide campaign that ran on television, billboards, radio and online, powerfully encapsulating the forever consequences of speeding for his family, friends and the emergency personnel who attended the crash scene. Suicide kills more Australians than road accidents do. In 2008, the most recent figures available, 2191 people took their own lives, while the annual road toll has fallen below 1400.

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It’s time to talk

For the past decade suicide numbers have hovered around 2050 a year. The facts are not widely known because of stigma, prejudice, ignorance and a centuries-old taboo that once barred those who’d taken their own lives from burial in the local cemetery. But there’s a new tension building between the suppression of public discussion around suicide and a belief that greater community awareness may help save lives. Mental health researcher Professor Patrick McGorry is the chief stirrer in favour of a radical rethink. As Australian of the Year in 2010 he raised his advocacy to fever pitch. He wants newspapers to keep a tally of suicides, just as we count road deaths. He wants a national campaign stressing the links between mental illness and suicidal thoughts. He wants to revisit guidelines that restrict media reporting. ‘We should adopt the same approach that we fund heavily to prevent deaths on the road,’ he says. Suicide is preventable and treatable, according to US psychologist Professor Thomas Joiner, who spends his life investigating why people do it. Experts agree that almost everyone who dies this way had a mental disorder at the time. Joiner’s groundbreaking study of suicide shows that most people at risk are ambivalent about dying, just as they are ambivalent about living. An oft-quoted suicide note written by a man before leaving his apartment for San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge said: ‘If one person smiles at me on the way I will not jump.’ The Gap in Sydney is Australia’s most notorious suicide spot. Donald Ritchie lives opposite. He was honoured recently for his efforts to persuade people he sees lingering at the clifftop to take heart. He chats to them, offers them a cup of tea and saves lives. If you can connect with people and get them through that darkest hour, they can stay alive. A Melbourne boy who committed suicide two years ago phoned four of his friends on the eve of his death. All were busy with exams and previous engagements. He didn’t tell any of

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Kate Legge

them his call was a scream for help. His mother didn’t know the depth of his despair. She’d picked up the phone herself to ring him about dinner, but decided to wait until he came home. He never did. ‘It’s a myth that there is nothing you can do to stop a person who wants to die,’ insists Dawn O’Neil, CEO of the national depression initiative, Beyond Blue. ‘You can do something and we need the whole of Australia to get behind a prevention campaign so that parents and friends and relatives become aware of people close to us who might be at risk.’ Compulsory seatbelts, roadside alcohol and drug testing, P-plate passenger limits and the massive public awareness campaigns that have been running since 1989 have helped force the downward trend of road fatalities. Smoking is another killer that’s targeted through graphic advertisements presenting the horrors of mouth, lung and throat cancer. So why do we steer clear of simple measures that might prevent people taking their own lives? Distressed citizens have been throwing themselves off Melbourne’s West Gate Bridge since it opened in the 1970s. One study recorded 62 suicides over seven years. Calls for a barrier went unheeded until 2009, when one was erected after a different incident. Last September the federal government finally buckled to pleas for fencing at The Gap. ‘Would there be any hesitation in spending a few million dollars to address a road blackspot that had been taking 50 lives a year for decades?’ begged the local federal member, Malcolm Turnbull. San Francisco has been just as slow to erect a safety net below the Golden Gate Bridge. The Californian Highway Patrol first demanded restraints to stop people jumping off in 1937. It took 70 years and an estimated 1300 deaths before $5 million was allocated last August for the design and construction of a stainless steel net that will give jumpers a second chance.

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It’s time to talk

Barriers reduce suicides. When railings were removed from the Grafton Bridge in Auckland, suicides at the site shot up. Once they were reinstalled, the rate came down and there was no subsequent increase in suicides from neighbouring bridges. Professor Joiner dubs the history of resistance towards preventing suicide ‘a moral outrage’. Joiner, whose father committed suicide, will visit Newcastle this year as a guest of the Hunter Institute of Mental Health. He applauds the Golden Gate Bridge plan cautiously, since it has not yet been built. ‘It is unconscionable that a suicide barrier has not been erected … The problem is not money and aesthetics, though if it were that would be appalling enough. The problem, rather, is ignorance and prejudice,’ Joiner writes in his 2010 book, Myths About Suicide. Law student Tristan Jepson swallowed an overdose of pills in 2004, after years of battling depression. He left his parents a letter instructing them not to make a public announcement and requesting a very private funeral. His parents, Marie and George Jepson, initially respected his wishes. Marie tells me: My father grew up in a Catholic area of southern Germany where people who committed suicide weren’t to be buried in the cemetery. Many people won’t even acknowledge that a suicide has occurred even today. I am aware people keep their distance. I accept it is part of how they have to manage it. I can only say how I feel. To me it was simply a fact that this had happened and we took the decision to talk about it.

The Jepsons made an announcement at their local church, where concern was expressed about whether Tristan could go to heaven. ‘It was a shock for the community but it gave people permission to talk about it,’ Marie says. ‘When everyone is hiding from it, then that is a really tragic

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Kate Legge

thing. There is so much ignorance out there.’ The Jepson family set up a foundation in honour of Tristan, with a special focus on educating the legal profession about depression in its ranks. ‘We’ve got to break down the shame,’ says Marie. ‘People who are depressed do anything to mask their symptoms. We should be out there telling people that if someone around you says they are thinking of committing suicide, don’t ignore it. Call an ambulance. Take them to emergency. If we help one person it will be worth it.’ That depression can be just as life-threatening as a heart attack is the message Marie wants to spread: With suicide we need to stress the importance of creating relationships and networks between people … to enable conversations where feelings and concerns can be talked about and listened to without being judged. Creating a public face, having someone talk openly about being depressed and at the point of committing suicide, gives people permission to talk about their own feelings.

Ignorance and prejudice will continue as long as the chickenand-egg conundrum of silence and shame suffocates any concerted attempt to publicise symptoms, triggers, mental health service providers, preventive action, and the need for heightened vigilance and attention to the sheer size of the problem.

Under the radar When the former South Australian Crown Solicitor Mark Johns took on the job of State Coroner he was unprepared for the number of suicides his office had to investigate each year – one out of every 10 deaths. ‘I don’t know whether I’m naive, but it came to me as a complete surprise. Take any batch of files that I go through for findings and I know now there’s inevitably going

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It’s time to talk

to be two suicides in there. Over the past five years I’ve become acclimatised to it, but I’ll never forget my initial impression,’ he says. The national toll of 2200 a year is regarded as conservative because of inconclusive coronial findings and under-reporting. Standards of proof for suicide are higher than the ordinary balance of probabilities, so if there’s no note left or threat made, and only circumstantial evidence of intent – this is often the case with a single-vehicle fatality – then a question mark remains, often to the great relief of family. An estimated 55,000 people attempt suicide each year; Suicide Prevention Australia reckons 20 times this number contemplate it. Dawn O’Neil experienced an epiphany just like Mark Johns. She was, until recently, CEO of Lifeline, where a member of staff who was examining statistics told her that suicide was the leading cause of death for males under 44. ‘That was astounding for me,’ she says. The discovery prompted Lifeline to experiment with a small community-service spot to alert the public to signals of depression and mental illness often associated with suicide. ‘Everything we stay silent about becomes worse; it doesn’t go away,’ she says. ‘We know this from so many issues, so it’s really important that we find a sensible way of talking about this.’ Mental health professionals are divided over whether talking about suicide will help or harm those at risk. Fear of a contagion effect runs deep. There is concern that publicity will glamorise this hideous end, or possibly heighten anxiety, stress, and thoughts of suicide. One psychiatrist worries that too much attention will encourage a moral panic among parents that doesn’t correspond to the actual risk. (But don’t we lecture kids on road safety nonstop?) The taboo stretches back to the 18th century, when many European countries banned Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther for fear the story of a depressed man who kills himself could inspire imitative behaviour.

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Kate Legge

Both camps come armed with evidence, but accuracy is hampered by the inability to control conditions for proper scientific testing, the lack of public campaigns available for study, and shifts in media habits with the proliferation of unregulated internet sites such as YouTube and Facebook that fall outside the guidelines for reporting on suicide. Some experts argue that copycat events will occur among friendship groups regardless of media reporting. In Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, three families have attended their children’s funerals in the past three years. None of these deaths was discussed in the media, but the young adults knew each other. Suicide Prevention Australia cites evidence that increasing public awareness can encourage suicidal individuals to seek help. But the Mindframe National Media Initiative, which oversees the guidelines for media, found a strong association between presentations of suicide and increases in suicide behaviour – particularly when stories were prominent or sensationalised, or described the method of death in detail. ‘It appears to be a tricky and fine line to walk,’ says Mindframe’s program manager, Jaelea Skehan. ‘There is no doubt increasing media reporting about suicide and suicide deaths will increase community awareness of the problem and will probably put pressure on governments to increase funding for suicide prevention. But at what cost?’ Professor McGorry bristles. ‘What we haven’t looked at is the cost of colluding with silence,’ he says. ‘I looked at the evidence before talking about this publicly, and I think the risks are overstated. All we do is reinforce the silence and shame. The writers of these guidelines take such a narrow scientific view.’ Childhood psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg welcomes the debate but points to a 40 per cent decline in youth suicide rates since 1997 as proof that current policies are working:

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We still have a long way to go, but with respect to Pat [McGorry], the way we’ve been handling it is splendid. If it isn’t broken, why fix it? I’m happy for there to be a conversation about the mental health problems such as depression that lead to suicide, but the more we focus on the outcome of suicide the greater the likelihood it will occur. I worry that if we go full-bottle on suicide we will encourage copycat-ing and miss a marvellous opportunity to lower the stigma, shame and fear around depression that I see every single day in my office.

In December 2010, a Senate investigation into suicide recommended sweeping changes to the status quo, in a report called The Hidden Toll. Impressed by Scotland’s Choose Life prevention campaign promoting public discussion, media reports and advertisements – with the slogan ‘Suicide. Don’t hide it. Talk about it’ – the Senate committee called for a shake-up that fits McGorry’s prescription. It urged a review of media guidelines and the regular release of national figures on suicide. It also recommended a sustained and well-resourced campaign to run for at least five years to raise community awareness and give information about services and support to high-risk groups such as teens and young adults, men, and people in remote and rural areas. The federal government has yet to act on this advice, but advocates have been cheered by its creating the position of Minister for Mental Health – currently Mark Butler holds the position – and increasing spending so crucial to improving services and training providers at the frontline of suicide prevention. A youth educator, Jenny Allen from Youth Focus Inc., told the Senate inquiry she understood the wariness towards raising suicide’s profile:

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[But] not to talk about it at all, pretty much, only reinforces the belief that it’s wrong to talk about suicide. It makes people feel like they are alone … When we go into schools at the present time, we cannot mention the word ‘suicide’ and we certainly cannot talk about self-harm, even though that is what we really need to do.

When Suicide Prevention Australia asked for personal testimony to prepare its Senate submission, more than 200 people bore witness to suicide’s devastation. Its CEO, Ryan McGlaughlin, believes these narratives can break down the stigma. ‘We need to get better at safely talking about suicide so that people at risk are encouraged to get help, and we need to give those who are affected by suicide a voice to help their healing,’ he says. Coronial archives are full of investigations into deaths that never come to light. SA Coroner Johns says it frustrates him that he sits on a body of knowledge that could be useful to epidemiologists, but is never referred to again once a file is closed. ‘It never gets shared by anybody. If I’m the only person who knows … what good is that?’ he asks. Studies have shown that as many as half of those with a relative who died by their own hand hide the fact. Philippa Cocciolone has learnt that there’s no quicker way of emptying a room than announcing that her brother Julian took his life. He was clever academically and gifted musically. Midway through the first year of his law degree he began taking an anti-acne medication that has been linked to bouts of depression. He saw a GP, who referred him to a psychologist. ‘He told them he was depressed and suicidal,’ Philippa recalls. ‘We didn’t realise how bad it was.’ One morning in April 2009, Philippa found Julian hanging from the garage door. His death had a catastrophic effect. ‘My father felt this terrible sense of failure. Two days after Julian died

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he came into my bedroom and stood in the doorway clutching a pillow and crying, “How can we live?” I don’t think he ever recovered.’ A year later, almost to the day after Julian’s death, Philippa’s father killed himself. A neighbour accompanied her mother to the garage, where they found his body. Afterwards, the same neighbour: wouldn’t step out of the house and wouldn’t allow us to hug her. She says she was in self-protection mode; she didn’t want anything to do with our situation, almost slamming the door in our face. They’d been good friends with my parents. Their blinds stayed down until we moved out.

Philippa’s then boyfriend also recoiled from the fallout. Social isolation is a common experience. Doctors, social workers and educators told the Senate inquiry how the deeply ingrained taboo of silence and shame impedes the recovery of those left behind. This is a part of the story McGorry wants told. ‘We don’t report the road toll in a sensationalist way. We report it factually. We show the actual damage that is done to people’s lives and to the lives of survivors.’

Everybody hurts One day I was standing on a tube station in London. I was 18. My attention was drawn to the roar of an approaching train. As it thundered out of the tunnel a man leapt from the platform into its path. I ran as fast as I could up the ramp and into the light, away from the horror of an instant that has never faded from my recall. Train drivers regard suicide as an occupational hazard. One Victorian driver told me trains mowed down 68 people around

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Kate Legge

the state last year. ‘You can’t stop a train like a wheelbarrow,’ he says. The driver at the controls on the train that killed the schoolboy last November had been on the job for only three months. He declined to be interviewed for this story, but a relative told me he was badly shaken. ‘Everybody Hurts When You Speed’ was the title of the Victorian road-safety blitz based on teenager Luke Robinson’s death and the emotional carnage it wrought in his community. In my search to find out more about the suicide of the young schoolboy I discovered a series of online tributes posted by his mother in the weeks afterward. ‘Dear ----,’ she wrote. ‘At first I was looking for you everywhere. Then I had to force myself to believe you were dead. I’ve cried for you so much, the pain is too intense.’ She tells him how everyone in his immediate family is broken: Your Dad misses you terribly much. He cries so much every day, so profound is his pain. You were the best kid. He loved so much being with you, talking to you. You had all the qualities he wanted. He wanted to help you, but you didn’t talk.

His sibling, an older sister, can’t sleep, she’s so overwhelmed by sadness. His mother writes: Dear ----, your sister said to me that this pain of losing her little brother to suicide IS WORSE than any physical pain. She misses you so much. You need to know this.

The ripple continues: It pains me terribly to see your friends distressed by your death. They are too young to experience such a grief. Likewise you were far too young to die. You had many

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good friends. Why couldn’t you talk to any of them about your pain?

She counts among the bereft several strangers who lent help in the line of duty: It’s a whole community who’s mourning. You should have seen the policeman and woman who found your poor battered body. They were in shock! And the train driver too! How incredibly sad and awful.

In one of her final entries she prays that ‘we may have enough strength to go on living’. Her anguish illuminates the daily agony of survival. Like the legacy of Luke Robinson, perhaps her son’s death could begin a conversation as to how we might try to stop these very preventable tragedies.

f Kids p. 44 Psychology p. 141 Newspaper writing p. 62

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To save a species Deborah Smith

‘She has eggs.’ The animal reproduction expert Dr Thomas Hildebrandt is carrying out an ultrasound on an 800 kilogram black rhinoceros and tells everyone around him the good news visible on his computer screen. It is early morning in a dusty enclosure at Taronga Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo and an Australian and German team of more than 25 has gathered to attempt rhino IVF. Each part of the procedure has been specially adapted for the giants, from the harness attached to a bulldozer that lifts the anaesthetised rhino, Rocket, onto an operating table, to the long thin needle used to flush out her precious eggs. It is more than 30 years since the first human IVF baby was born, but rhinos present big challenges, says Hildebrandt, of the Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin. Rather than the 15 centimetre distance to an ovary in a woman, the team must collect the eggs from 1.5 metres inside the animal. ‘We had to develop new equipment and concepts,’ he says. The same applies to the electrical stimulator he uses the next day to obtain sperm from a male rhino, Kwanzaa. In the neighbouring yard, a little black rhino – the latest arrival in the zoo’s natural breeding program for the critically

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endangered species – is leaping about beside her mother. Now six weeks old, she is the eleventh black rhino calf born at the zoo. But Rocket is unable to conceive naturally because of uterine problems, making the creation of an IVF embryo the only option if she is to contribute to the genetic diversity of the breeding stock, says the zoo’s reproductive biologist, Tamara Keeley. ‘And we don’t want to lose her genes.’ The day starts at 7.15am with a warning from senior veterinarian Dr Benn Bryant. Humans are particularly sensitive to the anaesthetic he will shoot into Rocket, so great care must be taken. ‘A very small exposure could be very dangerous to you,’ he tells the team. There is also the possibility that the rhino could rouse at any point. ‘You always need a clear route of escape.’ Two keepers have been assigned to Rocket for three months – one playing the ‘good cop’ and doling out affection and treats, such as banana and sweet potato, the other the ‘bad cop’ who gives the injections. In the previous week she has received three big doses of hormones to make her super ovulate, and since 6.00am the good cop, Karen Ellis, has been talking to her to keep her calm. Rocket, who was born in the wild, is the favourite of Jennifer Conaghan, the zoo’s black rhino supervisor. ‘She’s not difficult, but she keeps that raw quality,’ she says. ‘Sometimes she’s not very trusting.’ The savvy rhino instantly twigs that her routine has changed when Bryant arrives with the dart gun, and she trots up and down the yard. But within 20 minutes she is flat out on a ground sheet and the team moves in. Once it has been established she has a good supply of eggs, she is lifted onto the operating table. At the front end, Bryant gives her an anaesthetic gas, and vital statistics – such as her heart rate, temperature and the amount of carbon dioxide she breathes

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out – are monitored. A shade cloth protects her from the heat and ice packs are placed on her back. The risk is that her huge body weight will affect her ability to breathe, Bryant says. At the back end, the three German researchers are preparing the equipment to reach the rhino’s ovaries. The ultrasound device, which is inserted into her anus, has a long thin tube attached, which will direct the tip of the egg collection needle to just in front of the ultrasound, so it can be seen on the laptop. Dr Robert Hermes must reach far in with his arm and hold the ultrasound device in place for more than half an hour at a time, while Hildebrandt inserts the collection needle and jabs it into a follicle. Next to him, Dr Frank Goeritz controls the flow of fluid to suck out the eggs. It’s risky. Hildebrandt could hit a big blood vessel which is only 2 centimetres away from the ovary, near the spine. ‘We are very tense when we do this procedure. If we make a mistake it has a severe consequence,’ he says. This is the fifth year the team has tried rhino IVF at the zoo and everyone’s contribution is vital, he says. ‘It is a joint effort. And we found the best collaborators in the world in Dubbo.’ In 2006, they obtained rhino eggs for the first time. In 2008, their last attempt, they achieved another world first, producing a rhino IVF embryo, but it survived for less than 24 hours. By 10.00am both of Rocket’s ovaries have been flushed. It is important that the rhino is not kept unconscious longer than necessary, and there is a sudden, adrenalin-pumping rush to pack up and get everyone out of the yard and out of view before she wakes up. Hildebrandt spends about six months a year travelling the world with his colleagues, assisting institutions with animal reproduction. In the early 1990s he developed ultrasound for elephants, followed by a non-surgical method of artificial insemination, which involves threading a 2 millimetre thick tube about

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3 metres into the uterus of an unsedated female. Elephants are much more intelligent than rhinoceros and can be readily taught to accept the procedure, but rhinos must be sedated. The main challenge, says Hildebrandt, whose team has produced five rhino calves around the world by artificial insemination, was to develop a special catheter to pass through the convoluted passage in the female’s cervix to deliver the sperm to the uterus. This twisty route is the reason male rhinos spend about an hour and half having sex, compared with the minute or less it takes an elephant: they must try to fill up the cervix with sperm. An advantage for the males is that they can reach new tree branches while mounted and they have plenty of time to snack, he says. ‘They start to eat between orgasmic waves.’ The scientists, on the other hand, like to complete the rhino artificial insemination in about 20 minutes. While they were at Dubbo last week, the team used frozen sperm from a white rhino, Thomas, who died six years ago, to inseminate a wildborn female white rhino, Intombi. Hildebrandt also works with other animals, including Asian lions, bears, and European hares, which can become pregnant again when they are already pregnant. His favourite animal is the naked mole rat of Kenya, which lives in a colony with only one female queen, a few males and lots of sexually repressed workers who dig tunnels and fight predators. ‘No other rodent can reach the age of 28 years,’ he says while three other team members are in a neighbouring laboratory, scrutinising Rocket’s fluid for precious eggs. When an egg is spotted under the microscope, an enthusiastic cry rings out from the lab where Keeley, and vets Dr Lisa Maclellan, of Seven Creeks Equine Vet Clinic in Victoria, and Dr Jenny Kelly, of the South Australian Research and Development

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Institute, are working. The tally of eggs is eight. They are safely stored in a warm incubator to await the arrival of sperm the next morning. The team hopes the black rhino IVF research will eventually be applicable to the northern white rhino. They are extinct in the wild and only eight remain in captivity. ‘A technology like IVF would potentially save the species,’ Bryant says. Apart from conservation, Hildebrandt says they are driven by a competitive desire to improve on technology that at the moment can sometimes do more harm than good. For the collection of sperm the team has developed a large, 15 volt electrical probe that is inserted in the bull’s rectum and used to stimulate nerves that control muscles in the reproductive tract so sperm is squeezed out. ‘It is not like a normal orgasm,’ he says. Previously researchers have used probes that burnt or even killed the animals. But his team’s device is very safe, he says. ‘If you hold it in your hand you don’t feel anything.’ As we observe early the next morning on an anaesthetised Kwanzaa, ultrasound is also used to find the best spot to apply the stimulator, a process which results in strange automatic leg lifts by the unsuspecting giant, followed by the collection of about 15 millilitres of sperm. As it turns out, none of the eight eggs from Rocket, nor another eight from another female, Musi, which have the sperm injected into them, develops into an embryo. But it is early days, says Keeley. When IVF was developed for horses and cows, researchers had lots of eggs to work with, but the procedure cannot be attempted more than once a year with black rhinos. The team is already deciding what changes to make next time, she says. ‘This is an extremely new technique. We’re still learning a lot.’

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f Sex p. 98 Babies p. 28 Conservation p. 93

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18/08/11 9:35 AM

Birth of a killer Sonia Shah

Terrie Taylor is one of the world’s leading experts on pediatric malaria. Since the 1980s, she’s spent six months of every year inside malaria’s epicentre in central Africa, unravelling the mysteries of a disease that takes the lives of 3000 African children every day. Taylor meets me at the airport in Blantyre, a city in southern Malawi with a population of 500Â€000, at the beginning of the 2007 rainy season. Suffering an average of 170 bites from malaria-infected mosquitoes every year, between 40 and 70 per cent of the entire populace of malaria-plagued nations such as Malawi harbour malaria parasites in their blood. In her fifties, Taylor wears long loose skirts and keeps her frizzy brown hair parted in the middle. She starts talking straight away, as if we’ve known each other for years, grabbing my shoulder and making gently irreverent cracks. She marches through the airport waving and calling out greetings to nearly everyone we pass. The air in Blantyre, as we exit the airport, is incredibly hot, and heavy with humidity. Soon the rains will start, and the public hospital where Taylor works will be full of frightened parents proffering their limp, fevered children. During a typical malaria season, the research ward where Taylor works admits 250 malaria-infected children, of whom between 25 and 40 will die. And yet despite the

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passage of decades, being separated from her new husband (who is back home in Michigan), the oppressive heat, and the inevitable malaria deaths she will most certainly witness, Taylor exudes excitement. She’s more like an avid camp counsellor at the beginning of summer than a doctor about to minister to an epidemic. She extols the friendliness of the staff at Blantyre’s ramshackle airport, the beautiful views along our drive, the easy-to-clean halls of the hospital. Perhaps this is her coping method, I think to myself. Or perhaps not. For Taylor is a scientist, too. In a matter of days she will venture into the beating heart of the malarial beast she’s stalked for decades. As with Captain Ahab and the whale, there’s a certain giddy anticipation to it. Most pathogens mellow as they age. It’s enlightened selfinterest, as the theory goes. Diminishing virulence is a superior strategy for survival. It doesn’t make much sense for a pathogen to rapidly destroy its victim – a dead body just means it’s time to move on. Take measles and smallpox, for example. In Europe, when those pathogens first emerged, they were probably reckless killers, taking millions of lives. The survivors learned how to withstand the diseases’ ravages, though, and in time both measles and smallpox settled into being unremarkable childhood illnesses, felling scores only when encountering virgin populations, such as those in the New World of the 15th century. Which begs the question as to malaria’s tenacity and continuing malevolence. Malaria has been plaguing humans in Africa for some 500Â€000 years, with the first encounters between human, mosquito, and malaria parasite probably occurring around the time our ancestors discovered fire. Malaria existed in Africa before then, too, feeding on the birds, chimps and monkeys that lived in the canopy. We’ve had plenty of time – our entire evolutionary history, in fact – to adapt to malaria, and it to us. Or, at least, to devise tools and strategies to blunt its appetite. And yet, despite the millennia-long battles between us, malaria still

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manages to infect at least 300 million of us – that is, 1 out of 21 human beings on the planet – and kills nearly 1 million, year after year. As an extinguisher of human lives, write the malariologists Richard Carter and Kamini Mendis, malaria historically – and to this day – ‘has few rivals’. It remains essentially wild and untamed, despite its great age. And experts such as Terrie Taylor have spent lifetimes trying to figure out why.

q One simple reason for malaria’s ferocity is that the protozoan creature that causes the disease is, by definition, a cheater at the game of life. It is a parasite, a creature that can eke out its livelihood only by depleting others of theirs. The rest of us all play our obscure little part in the drama of life, weaving ourselves deeper into local ecology and and strengthening its fabric, the bees pollinating the flowers, predators culling the herds of their weakest members. Parasites don’t help anyone. They’re degenerates. Take the parasitic barnacle, Sacculina carcini. It is born with a head, mouth, segmented body, and legs, just like any respectable barnacle. But then, because it is a parasite, it stops developing into an independent creature. It burrows into the shells of the crabs off which it will spend its life feeding. There it loses its segments, its legs, its tail, and even its mouth, devolving into a pulsing plantlike form, little more than a blob with tendrils sucking food from the forlorn crab’s body. It’s the very definition of repellent. In 1883, Scottish lecturer Henry Drummond called parasitism ‘one of the gravest crimes of nature’ and a ‘breach of the law of Evolution’. Who can blame him? And yet parasites such as [the malaria parasite] Plasmodium are not anomalous on this earth. According to science writer Carl Zimmer, one-third of all described species practise the parasitic lifestyle. To be fair, for Plasmodium parasitism arose as an accom-

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modation to newfound opportunities, not because of any intrinsic quality or irreversible mechanism within it. Plasmodium did not start out life hardwired to steal. This killer first emerged on the planet as a plantlike creature, most likely some kind of aquatic algae. We know this because 10 per cent of the proteins in modern-day Plasmodium parasites contain vestiges of the machinery of photosynthesis. Plasmodium’s ancestors probably rubbed shoulders with the eggs and larvae of mosquitoes, similarly floating on sun-dappled waters. When the mosquitoes took wing, malaria’s ancestors went quietly along with them. It must have happened, then and again, that when a mosquito pierced a bird or chimp or some other blood-filled creature, malaria’s algae ancestors fell into the wound. Most probably died. But through the blind ticking clock of evolution, one day some subset of the interlopers found themselves thriving in those crimson seas, and a vampiric parasite was born. Such are the ironies of surviving on this protean planet. A creature at the very bottom of the zoological scale, a humble being beneficently converting sunlight into living tissue (and thereby providing the basis for the planet’s entire food chain), turns into one of the most ruthlessly successful parasites ever known, commanding two separate spheres of the living world, human and entomological. Henry Drummond would have been appalled.

q Delve into even the most rudimentary scientific literature on malaria and you will soon be confronted with a dizzying range of unpronounceable words. There is exflagellation, erythrocytic schizogony, and exo-erythrocytic schizogony. There are gametocytes and trophozoites and sporozoites. These are not obscure terms for little-discussed facets of the parasite whispered over

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cluttered lab benches by a few old-school malaria nerds, but rather basic stages in the parasite’s life cycle bandied about by nearly everyone in the malaria world, from ponytailed Harvard undergrads to queenly Cameroonian researchers and grizzled Italian vaccine makers. It is as if scientists had to come up with a whole new language just to talk about malaria. That’s because during the course of its life, Plasmodium transmogrifies into no fewer than seven different forms, which vary in both morphology and physiology. Its parasitic modus operandi demands such shape-shifting wiliness. After all, in order to survive, the malaria parasite must extort from two different species: the animal whose blood it feeds upon, and the insect who deposits it into that animal’s blood. It’s sort of like robbing a bank while stealing a car. Things get complicated. The mosquito’s immune system instinctively attacks the parasite, encapsulating the intruder in scabs and bombarding it with toxic chemicals. To survive, the parasite must unleash armies of progeny in such massive numbers that fighting it off becomes more trouble than it’s worth. Male and female forms of the parasite, called gametocytes, then fuse, and the resulting parasites create cysts that cling to the walls of the bug’s gut. (The spasmodic waving of the male gametocyte’s long tail, which precedes the act of fusing with the female – yes, this microbe reproduces sexually as well as asexually – is called exflagellation.) Tens of thousands of slithering threads explode from the cysts and swarm up to the mosquito’s salivary gland. This is the form the parasite must take to infect human beings. Malariologists call it the sporozoite. When the mosquito starts a blood feed, some two dozen slivery sporozoites will escape into their next host. The parasite’s shtick fails in most of the world’s 3200 species of mosquito. It works only in a single genus, called Anopheles (rhymes with ‘enough of peas’), most likely because of that mosquito’s strangely tepid defences. This restriction doesn’t hinder

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the parasite terribly, though: there are some 430 known species of Anopheles, distributed in every corner of the planet except for Polynesia, east of Vanuatu. At least 70 species are known to carry malaria. Outwitting the human body’s defences, though, requires orders of magnitude more cunning. The parasite must conceal its appetite, and indeed its very presence inside the body. The object of its desire – the haemoglobin inside red blood cells, which it feasts upon – is particularly precious. Produced from iron in bone marrow, haemoglobin makes it possible for blood cells to attach to oxygen molecules, and thus ferry life-giving oxygen to the body’s tissues. Without haemoglobin, lone oxygen molecules will maraud unattached, degrading cells, proteins, and DNA as surely as they brown sliced apples and rust metal, and the body weakens, becomes anaemic, and ultimately perishes. The parasite must hide. First, the sporozoites retreat to the liver, where they spend a few surreptitious days shifting, regenerating, dividing, and generating again, secretly transforming into an army of 50Â€000 parasites in a new form that is capable of infecting red blood cells: the merozoite. In the next stage of the invasion, the merozoites pour into the bloodstream. They are cleverly disguised inside the liver cells they’ve gagged and murdered, but an epic battle ensues nevertheless, and the body’s immune fighters slaughter thousands. It isn’t a perfect victory. If a few stragglers in this marauding horde manage to escape, they latch onto red blood cells, and within moments penetrate the cells’ interior. There they quietly feast on haemoglobin, and a new round of shifting, regenerating, dividing, and generating follows. Some transform from tiny ring-shaped beings into fat, rounded creatures and unleash a wave of progeny. When nothing is left of the former oxygen-carrying cell besides a stream of waste and a bulge of fattened parasites, the parasites burst out of the cell and rush out to invade and consume a fresh crop of cells.

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Others quietly shape-shift into the male and female forms called gametocytes and lie in wait inside their hijacked blood cells. With any luck, they will be picked up by another bloodthirsty Anopheles mosquito. A creature this protean and multifarious defies easy challenge.

f Killers p. 111 Adventure p. 6 Blood suckers p. 75

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Lousy science Christine Kenneally

In a laboratory in the Faculty of Veterinary Science at the University of Melbourne, Vern Bowles slides a Petri dish into a microscope and centres it on two coffee-brown lice eggs: one is full and opaque, the other empty and almost entirely translucent. Suspended to their right, like a distorted astrological sign, is a big, fat louse. The microscope illuminates her segmented body, creepy-crawly legs, and the dried scraps of blood in her gut. Bowles is the chief scientific officer at Hatchtech, a biotech startup developing a new kind of lousicide. When I ask him why lice are interesting, his face lights up. They are ‘fascinating’, he tells me. ‘Amazing!’ Most of Australia’s parents feel differently. Their indoctrination into the world of head lice is typically quick, brutal and itchy. When my son started primary school, I missed the telltale signs. Soon enough we were all clawing at our scalps. We doused our hair with a fluid that smelled like flea-shampoo and raked fine-toothed combs over flinching heads. The experience was repulsive, and yet lice treatments must be applied at least twice, so we did it again the following week. Still, every six months they returned. What drives most parents really insane is the louse’s absolute ineradicability.

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Christine Kenneally

Even after many bouts, we aren’t sure how to get rid of lice for good. Louse misinformation is as ubiquitous as lice themselves – and worse, many parents feel stigmatised by a lice infestation. Nevertheless, if you do talk about lice, the same themes recur: it wasn’t like this when we were kids; treatments are laborious and ineffective; synthetic products are toxic; natural products work only for the lucky or the righteous; and, weirdly, it is always the same child who catches lice. Underlying all of this is the notion that we can be truly lice-free. Expecting that we can vanquish lice, let alone do it easily, may be our first mistake. The lice that plague Australia’s schoolyards today belong to a lineage that has tracked all of human history. Lice combs feature in Renaissance paintings of the baby Jesus. They were buried in the tombs of 3000-year-old Egyptian mummies (for the lice in the afterlife). Scientists even found a 10Â€000-year-old nit clinging tenaciously to a human hair in northeast Brazil. Genetic studies show that Pediculus capitis has followed our receding hairlines through millions of years of ape– human evolution, and now it is brilliantly adapted to the human head. I spoke to Steven Barker, a parasitologist at the University of Queensland, who has examined the parasite all over the world. He says, ‘We will never eradicate lice.’ Nevertheless, says Barker, for one brief moment in the 20th century humans got the upper hand. Until the 1940s, lice in Anglo-Saxon populations were kept under control by the constant nit-picking of the family caretaker. Probably less than 5 per cent of children carried infestations. After World War II powerful synthetic insecticides devastated many insect populations, including lice. Parents today who were born in the 1960s and early ’70s remember few lice in their childhood. Since then, lice have developed resistance to insecticides. They now infest up to 35 per cent of Australian schoolchildren between the ages of 4 and 11 once per year. Indeed, says Barker, ‘Australia may be the

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Lousy science

lice capital of the world.’ Although lice have been on the increase since the 1970s, it’s taken governments and markets a while to respond. Even today lice treatments are not tightly regulated, and until 10 years ago there were few controlled trials on their efficacy. As lice spread and more lice products began to jostle for space on the pharmacy shelf, companies started to supply peer-reviewed papers proving their products can actually cure infestations. Or, rather, most studies show a product can eliminate most of the lice most of the time – and possibly more than a competitive product can. But if a single pregnant louse or just two eggs remain, the cycle will begin again. To help, Bowles points out, many treatments today are sold with a lice comb. ‘The question is, is it the product or the comb that’s removing the lice?’ (In fact, Bowles says, physically removing lice is currently the only foolproof method for getting them out.) Most treatments are neurotoxins. They damage the nervous system of the louse but they generally don’t hurt the egg, so treatment must be repeated in a week, when the remaining nits have hatched. Even if a neurotoxin can get inside the egg, it won’t do much until the third or fourth day, when the nervous system has developed. Hatchtech, which is planning to begin a new phase of trials on children, has created a lousicide that is also an ovicide. When it’s time for treated eggs to hatch, enzymes involved in hatching are blocked, and the louse dies inside the egg. If Bowles’s solution works, parents can use it just once, and Hatchtech may become more beloved than The Wiggles. But why has it been so hard to develop an effective product? In addition to resistance, safety and reinfestation issues, collecting and testing lice can be a challenge. Bowles tried harvesting lice from a school eradication program but says it was ‘feast or famine’. Barker’s university laboratory houses a colony of lice on which they regularly test commercial products. He tried

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Christine Kenneally

cultivating test lice on his leg and his arm but they made him feel lousy. ‘That’s where the word comes from,’ he said. ‘Lice inject chemicals into blood that make people feel bad, and they disrupt sleep and may also make thinking fuzzy – which is why people used to call the afflicted “nitwits”.’ It’s not just insecticides that have given up killing lice. Many parents have, too. Eliminating them is time-consuming, it can be traumatic for children, and even if you achieve it, another parent may not. ‘It’s going to take a couple of generations to lower lice levels again,’ says Barker. In the meantime, he adds, ‘Bowles is right, we need new classes of treatments for eggs.’ There may be some comfort in the idea that resistance could cut both ways. Consider the tribe on remote Satawal Island in Micronesia where almost everyone has lice, and elaborate grooming rituals surround their removal. In that group, the socially challenged are the ten or so people who never seem to catch lice, no matter how many times they put them on their heads. Closer to home, biologist Deon Canyon at James Cook University tried to cultivate a lice colony on his head but could not get them to take. He found that up to 15 per cent of the lice that drank his blood haemorrhaged to death. It’s not what you’d call justice, but it scratches an itch.

f Flesh p. 192 School p. 44 Fat p. 46

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A fresh look at Earth Tim Flannery

Big ball of iron with some rock on the outside and a very very thin coating of moisture and oxygen and dangerous creatures.

A description of Earth, Wikipedia

What is life? Is it separable from Earth? At the most elemental level, we living beings are not even properly things, but rather processes. A dead creature is in every respect identical to a live one, except that the electrochemical processes that motivate it have ceased. Life is a performance – heaven’s performance – which is fed and held in place, and eventually extinguished, by fundamental laws of chemistry and physics. Another way of thinking about life is that we are all self-choreographed extravaganzas of electrochemical reaction, and it is in the combined impacts of those reactions, across all of life, that Gaia itself is forged. Thinking of life as something separate from Earth is wrong. A striking instance concerns the origins of diamonds. Analysis shows that many diamonds are made from living things. Tiny organisms adrift on an ancient sea took in carbon from the atmosphere, then died and sank into the abyss. From there

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geological processes carried the carbon into the Earth’s very mantle, subjecting it to unimaginable heat and pressure, thereby transforming it into diamonds. Eventually these were shot back to the surface in great pipes of molten rock, and today some grace our ï¬†ngers. Our planet formed some 4.5 billion years ago as a result of a ‘gravitational instability in a condensed galactic cloud of dust and gas’. It formed in an astonishingly short time, perhaps as little as 10 million years, and critically important qualities were added when a heavenly body the size of Mars struck the proto-Earth, liquefying it and ejecting from it a mass destined to become the Moon. The liqueï¬†ed remainder then began to differentiate into a metallic core, making up almost 30 per cent, a silicate mantle making up almost 70 per cent, and a thin crust making up just 0.5 per cent. Within a billion years, or perhaps just a few hundred million years, parts of that crust had begun to organise into life. That was so long ago that the Moon was far closer than it is today, and was replete with active volcanoes. It loomed large in the sky, and exerted such gravitational pull that Earth’s crust buckled many metres with each tidal swing. It challenges our imagination to think of microscopic portions in that ancient crust slowly becoming living things, and indeed how the spark of life was ï¬†rst kindled remains one of science’s great mysteries. But there is no doubt that the electrochemical processes that are life are entirely consistent with an origin in Earth’s crust – our very chemistry tells us that we are, in all probability, of it. This concept of life as living Earthly crust challenges the dignity of some. It should not. We have long understood, from biblical teaching and practical experience, that we are naught but earth: ashes to ashes, dust to dust, as the English burial service puts it. Indeed, ‘dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’ are among the oldest written words we have. The building blocks of life, however, go back even further

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A fresh look at Earth

than the formation of our planet. The elements that form us – the carbon, phosphorus, calcium and iron, to name but a few – were created in the hearts of stars. And not just in one generation of stars, for it takes the energy of three stellar generations combined to form some of the heavier elements, such as carbon, that life ï¬†nds indispensable. Stars age very slowly, and to complete three generations takes almost all of time – from the Big Bang to the formation of Earth. We are, as the astrophysicist Carl Sagan said, mere stardust, but what a wondrous thing that is. Earth’s crust may seem like a passive organ, a mere substrate, but it has been profoundly inï¬‡uenced by life, and it is the sheer size of life’s energy budget (the total amount of energy living things capture from the Sun) that makes this possible. Plants capture the Sun’s energy using photosynthesis. Inside green leaves lie tiny structures, called chloroplasts, which use the energy of sunlight to break apart molecules of CO2 which, if they were not so dealt with, would eventually make up most of Earth’s atmosphere. Plants use the CO2 to form organic compounds, which in turn are used to build bark, wood and leaves – indeed all the tissues of the plants around us. Look at a tree and what you see is mostly congealed carbon, a tonne of dry wood being the result of the destruction, by photosynthesis, of around two tonnes of atmospheric CO2. Green plants are far more efï¬†cient in their energy use than we humans with our fossil-fuelled power stations. Each year green plants manage to convert around 100 billion tonnes of atmospheric carbon into living plant tissue, and in so doing they remove 8 per cent of all atmospheric CO2. This is a truly extraordinary figure. Just imagine if no CO2 found its way into the atmosphere. In just 12 years plants would then absorb and use almost all of the atmospheric CO2. Plants capture about 4 per cent of the sunlight that falls on Earth’s surface, which gives life a primary energy budget

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(excluding sulphur bacteria and other non-photosynthetic pathways) of approximately 100 terawatts (100 trillion watts) annually. It’s the size of life’s primary energy budget and the resilience of its ecosystems (which is determined in part by biodiversity) that deï¬†ne a healthy planet. Scientists have only just begun to think about Earth in these terms, so measurements of productivity and diversity remain approximate. Yet it’s clear from major extinction events in the fossil record that if Earth’s energy budget and ecosystem resilience fall below certain thresholds, a fully functioning Earth system cannot be maintained. Useful parallels can be drawn between the way energy ï¬‡ows in economies and in Earth’s ecosystems. The size of economies is measured in dollars, while Earth’s energy budget is measured in terawatts. Dollars and terawatts clearly differ, but both represent potential resources that can be put to productive ends. Although an area of active study and dispute, it seems that the stability of both economies and ecosystems is related to their diversity, which itself is partly a function of size: the larger an economy or an ecosystem, the more diverse it can be. The presence of certain elements in economies and ecosystems can also help foster productivity. Banking is a good example. In economies, well-run and well-regulated banks aid the ï¬‡ow of capital, thus stimulating productivity. In ecosystems, certain species act rather like bankers by facilitating energy and nutrient ï¬‡ows. Earth’s ecological bankers include the big herbivores, those weighing a tonne or more. As we’ll soon see, in marginal ecosystems such as deserts or tundra, these ecological bankers speed the ï¬‡ow of resources through the ecosystem, allowing a substantial ‘biological economy’ to be built on a slender resource base. If humans destroy megafauna, they can induce the equivalent of a never-ending recession in such ecosystems, limiting their productivity and stability. And that impacts Earth function as a whole, just as a recession in the United States can affect the global economy.

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So how does life spend its capacious energy budget? Basically, it is deployed to modify our planet so as to make it more habitable, and just how that is done is best understood by comparing Earth with the dead planets, such as Venus and Mars. Planets can have up to three principal ‘organs’, which correspond to the three phases of matter: a solid crust, a liquid (or frozen) ocean and a gaseous atmosphere. A living planet uses its energy budget to kick the chemistry of its organs out of balance with each other. No greater example of this exists than oxygen. Earth’s atmosphere is full of this highly reactive element, but if life was ever extinguished, oxygen would quickly vanish by combining with elements in the rocks and oceans, forming molecules such as CO2. The chemical composition of the organs of dead planets, in contrast, exists in a state of equilibrium. As [the proposer of the Gaia hypothesis, James] Lovelock realised in the 1970s, a planet whose atmosphere consists almost entirely of CO2 is a planet whose life force, if there ever was one, is long exhausted – a planet at eternal rest. Carbon is the indispensable building block of life. You and I are made up of 18 per cent carbon by dry weight, and plants have a much higher percentage. Almost all of that carbon was once ï¬‡oating in the atmosphere, joined in a ménage à trois with oxygen to form CO2. Billions of years ago, when life was a weak infant struggling to survive, there was more CO2 in the atmosphere than there is today, for living things had not yet discovered a means to use it. Back then, perhaps, life nestled as microscopic bacteria in the bosom of the deep sea, or hid in sediments around hot springs. Wherever it found a refuge, its energy budget must have been small, as most of Earth was still untouched by its power. Today, however, CO2 forms just 4 parts per 10Â€000 of the gaseous composition of Earth’s atmosphere, while a by-product of photosynthesis, oxygen, forms 21 per cent. This is the ultimate measure of life’s triumph.

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Earth’s continental crust is far thicker than its oceanic crust and it’s made of lighter, silica-rich rock. The continents originated from erosion of the oceanic crust (which is made of basalt) and, remarkably, they may be a product of life. This might seem to be a large claim, but it’s worth keeping in mind that living things provide 75 per cent of the energy used to transform Earth’s rocks, while heat from within the Earth provides a mere 25 per cent. We tend to think about the transformation of rocks in Earth’s crust as the result of volcanoes, earthquakes and such. It’s easy to overlook the silent work of lichens, bacteria and plants, which create grains of soil from intransigent basalt and other rocks by reaching deep into the strata, leaching and breaking down the rock with the acids they exude. Their work, while microscopic in scale, is ceaseless, and thrice greater in effect than that of all the world’s volcanoes combined. We have no evidence of life for the ï¬†rst half billion years or so of Earth’s existence. Back then our planet was a water-covered sphere with little or no dry land. When life originated, those ancient living things, it has been suggested, produced acids that sped up the weathering process of the basaltic crust, separating the lighter elements in the basalt from the heavier ones. When these lighter elements are compressed and heated by movements in Earth’s crust they become granite, the foundation stone of the continents and the essence of the earth beneath our feet. Perhaps, given enough time, energy from within Earth could have effected the same transformation, but so vast was the amount of basalt weathered to create the ï¬†rst continents that recent research indicates it could have occurred only if life was capturing energy and using it to produce compounds that help break down rocks. We can think of Earth’s rocky crust as a huge holdfast, like the lower shell of an oyster, which life has formed to anchor itself. And if we imagine the rocks as life’s holdfast, then we can think of the atmosphere as a silken cocoon, woven by life for its own

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protection and nourishment. Just consider what the atmosphere does for us. Its greenhouse gases keep the surface of the planet at an average of around 15° Celsius, rather than –18° Celsius. All of the principal greenhouse gases are produced by life (though some, such as CO2, can be produced in other ways as well), and without them Earth would be a frozen ball. Ozone, a form of oxygen composed of three atoms bonded together, is a product of life, for all free oxygen is derived from plants. While it makes up just 10 parts per million of our atmosphere, it captures 97 to 99 per cent of all ultraviolet radiation heading our way. Without this protection, our DNA and other cellular structures would soon be torn apart and life at Earth’s surface would cease to exist. Then there is the more common form of oxygen (two atoms bonded together), which fuels our inner metabolic ï¬†res, providing the breath of life itself. Our atmosphere is truly wondrous. We may think of it as big, but it is by far Earth’s smallest organ. To compare it with the oceans, we need to imagine compressing its gases around 800 times, until it becomes liquid. If we could do that, we’d see that the atmosphere is just 1/500th the size of the oceans. It’s a delicate, dynamic and indispensable wrapping to the planet, a cocoon that is constantly being repaired and made whole by life itself, a cocoon that intimately wraps around every living thing and connects chemically with a great rocky shell that life has forged as its support. And sandwiched between holdfast and cocoon is the liquid circulatory system of the beast: Earth’s oceans and other waters. Earth is truly the water planet, for water in its three states – vapour, liquid and solid – defines and sustains it. Liquid water covers 71 per cent of Earth’s surface while solid water, mostly in the form of glacial ice, covers a further 10.4 per cent. Water is essential to life because the electrochemical processes that are life can occur only within it; ï¬‡uids as salty as the ancient oceans ï¬‡ow

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Tim Flannery

through our veins. The ocean was almost certainly the cradle of life, and it remains life’s most expansive habitat. With a volume of 1.37 billion cubic kilometres it is 11 times greater in volume than all of the land above the sea. But unlike the land, which is populated by life only at its surface, the entire volume of the oceans is a potential habitat. At the very beginning of our planet’s existence, Earth was lifeless and its three organs were in chemical equilibrium. No rocks survive from that distant time, 3.9 to 4.65 billion years ago. That’s because our restless planet has been continuously recycling itself, so that almost all the physical evidence testifying to the nature of Earth’s original crust has been ground to dust, melted and formed anew. But by examining rocks that date to a slightly later time, when Earth’s life force was still weak, we can gain deep insights into what the enlivening of our planet meant. In 2009 I visited the man who pioneered the still controversial idea that life might have helped create the continents. Minik Rosing is the director of the Geological Museum in Copenhagen and one of the foremost authorities on the origin of life. A ponytail- and jeans-wearing Inuit, he’s possessed of immense hospitality, and as we sat in his ofï¬†ce drinking tea and watching the snow fall outside, he spoke of his love of old rocks. The most venerable surviving parts of Earth’s rocky crust are, he said, between 3.3 and 3.8 billion years old. They’re precious relics of the youngest Earth we can directly know, formed less than a billion years after the planet itself came into existence. And the very oldest can be found in Greenland. Minik rose from his seat as he spoke and handed me a rock from his desk. It was, he said, around 3.8 billion years old, and I was astonished to see that it was not folded, battered and scarred as you might expect, but undistorted, its layers as smooth as sheets on a hospital bed. In one layer was a slender black smear, which Minik said marked the start of Earth’s carbon cycle, a cycle

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that largely deï¬†nes and maintains our planet. Instantly my mind was swallowed by the gulf of time that separates us from that moment when the living Earth-machine ï¬†rst ticked over. Today the carbon cycle runs at full roar, but back then, in a shallow ocean on a planet as fragile as an unshelled egg, it was as delicate and ï¬‡uttering as a quickening. Geologists have learned a great deal about the infancy of our Earth through studying such rocks, and no lesson is more marvellous than the strong grip that life has exerted on our planet over its 3.5-billion-year existence. At the time those rocks were formed, and for long after, Earth’s atmosphere was toxic, incapable of supporting life as we know it. The oceans also were a toxic brew, with high concentrations of metals such as iron, chromium, copper, lead and zinc, as well as carbon and other elements. All of this changed when microscopic plants and bacteria began to break CO2 into oxygen and carbon, and to use the metals dissolved in the sea water to speed up the chemical reactions that were essential to their existence. As they died and sank to the ocean ï¬‡oor, they carried their minute cargoes of metals with them, and so, over aeons, the oceans were purged of their dissolved metals, becoming chemically similar to the oceans of today. The metals buried in the sediments had a different fate. Often, they were carried deep into the crust, where heating and compression further concentrated them, leading to the formation of ore deposits. Sometimes these ore bodies became incorporated into the continents and were thrust high into mountain ranges, forming the fabulous golden wealth of places like Telluride, Nevada, or the Incan mines of Peru. A similar process gave rise to Earth’s coal, oil and gas deposits, though these formed as a result of living things pulling CO2 from the atmosphere, rather than from them taking metals into their bodies. This distant Earth history has profound implications for our modern industrial society. It accounts not only for the state of our

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Tim Flannery

atmosphere and oceans, and the good fortune of some countries in possessing valuable mineral deposits, but also for our bodies’ often-calamitous love of toxic metals as well. All of that matters because today we are digging up these elements at an unprecedented rate, and redistributing them through our air and waters, and that can have surprising consequences. As we will learn later, this is a tale of fundamental planetary disorder, which helps explain why some of us develop disorders such as intellectual disabilities and schizophrenia, and even perhaps why murder rates are high in some communities. It may seem a paradox that living things should take in toxic metals such as cadmium and lead as avidly as if they were the most precious nutrients on Earth. Assay any one of us and you’ll find a treasure trove of toxic metals at concentrations many times greater than they occur in the natural world around us. The answer to the paradox lies in those oceans of long ago. Back then life consisted of little more than bags of chemical reactions ï¬‡oating in an ocean packed with metals. The laws of chemistry dictate that some of the reactions most crucial to life are enhanced by the presence of metals. In technical parlance, metals are catalysts and co-factors – substances that either permit or accelerate chemical reactions. Catalysts are perhaps most familiar to us from the catalytic converters in cars, which work by using a metal, often platinum, to hasten reactions that remove pollutants from the car’s exhaust. In our bodies catalysts hasten enzymic reactions and, in an ocean full of potential catalysts, early life became dependent upon them. So unchanging has life’s chemistry been over the past two billion years that the majority of the 700-odd chemical reactions that run our bodies today are identical to those that occurred in those bags of chemical reactions that were early life. As early life mined the ocean’s dissolved metals the waters became leached of catalysts and living creatures became desper-

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ately hungry for them. Even today, it is metals that limit life’s spread in the oceans. In the frigid Southern Ocean, for example, a lack of iron is the key factor limiting plankton growth. Add iron and life ï¬‡ourishes. After two billion years of coping in a world where metals are not easy to be had, life has become extremely adept at keeping hold of whatever metals come its way. And in a world where human activity is releasing metals to the air and seas in ever greater abundance, that can be dangerous, for, like many good things, too much metallic catalyst can be very dangerous. So it is that, despite the damage mercury does to us, our bodies absorb the mercury in the ï¬†sh we eat even more avidly than the ï¬‡esh of the ï¬†sh itself. We store up the metal in our livers, skins and brains, even after we are mortally poisoned by it. The links between Earth’s oceans, crust and atmosphere are nowhere more elegantly exhibited than in the theory of continental drift. Every 300 million years or so the continents coalesce, creating a single large continent surrounded by oceanic crust. Then the landmass breaks apart again, eventually to come together in another cycle. You can think of the continents acting like dollops of scum floating on a pot of boiling water. The dollops move around, joining together and breaking apart, driven by the convection in the boiling water. While no one understands precisely what drives the movements of the continents, convection within Earth’s molten mantle, Earth’s gravity, and the pull of the Moon all appear to be factors. There are two kinds of plates: continental and oceanic. When two continental plates are moving apart, new oceanic crust forms between them. When a continental and oceanic plate collide, however, the oceanic plate is thrust under the continent, and is melted. As a result, mountain ranges, volcanoes and mineral-rich rocks are formed. A good example of this is the Andes. When two continental plates collide, it’s far harder for one to slip under the other. Instead the plates buckle, and truly gigantic mountains,

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Tim Flannery

such as the Himalayas, are formed. Rivers erode the mountains, creating fresh new soil, and it’s this renewal, along with the slow grinding of glaciers, that fertilises life on Earth with the minerals that are essential to plant and animal growth. It’s no accident that some of our greatest civilisations sprang up on the plains laid down along rivers flowing from high mountains. If the continents were spawned by life, then we must see this fantastic movement of Earth’s plates as at least partly a consequence of life itself. The most important thing about the movement of the continents in relation to life in the oceans is the effect it has on the recycling of salts. The waters of the ocean are recycled, by evaporation and precipitation and thence through Earth’s rivers, every 30Â€000 to 40Â€000 years, and with each recycling rivers leach salt from the continental rocks and carry it into the sea. You might deduce from this that the oceans are growing saltier, and in the 19th century this is exactly what scientists thought. They assumed that the oceans contained fresh water upon their formation, and, knowing the rate at which salt is carried into the oceans by rivers, they estimated Earth to be just a few tens of millions of years old. They then coupled this faulty ï¬†nding with a prediction that a sort of salty doomsday awaited us a few million years hence, when the oceans would become as salty as the Dead Sea. The truth is far more remarkable. The saltiness of the oceans has remained relatively constant for billions of years, and the drift of the continents plays a vital role in this regulation. As the continents move apart, the ocean’s basalt crust is stretched ever more thinly, until it ï¬†nally ruptures. These rupture lines are known as mid-ocean ridges. They are often located near the centre of ocean basins, and they allow the basins to grow wider. These remote, submarine mountain ranges are rich in life but are among the least known places on Earth. Greg Rouse, a friend of mine, explores them in a submersible, and he’s one of the few humans ever to have seen them at ï¬†rst hand.

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In 2005 Rouse explored one of the last unknown submarine mountain ranges, deep in the South Paciï¬†c Ocean. He showed me video footage taken on the trip of a fantastical white octopus which he had captured using a robotic arm and put in a container on the outside of the submersible. He was wildly excited at the thought of naming and describing the amazing creature, but during the three-hour ascent the ghostly octopus managed to open the lid of its container and escape back to the depths. He also told me something completely surprising. On the evening before one dive, a ï¬†lleted ï¬†sh had been cast overboard by a crew member of the support vessel, and when Rouse arrived at the crest of the range, 4 kilometres below, he discovered the ï¬†lleted ï¬†sh lying on the bottom, just where the submersible landed. For this to occur, the column of water below the vessel must have been completely serene. To us inhabitants of the turbulent atmosphere such things are utterly astonishing, and they underline how little we understand our planet and its workings. Mid-ocean ridges form where two continents are moving apart, stetching the oceanic crust between them. They resemble a double-crested mountain range, and between the crests, in a sort of rift valley, molten rock from deep in the Earth’s crust comes to the surface. Hydrothermal vents – deep, ï¬‡uid-ï¬†lled cracks in the oceanic crust – form, and all the ocean water in the world eventually circulates through these. It takes between 10 million and 100 million years for all the water to be recycled through the hydrothermal vents, but as it circulates the chemical structure of the sea water is altered by the extreme heat, and the salt is removed. This recycling of the oceans through evaporation, rainfall and rivers every 30Â€000 to 40Â€000 years, and through the crust at the mid-ocean ridges every 10 million years or so, keeps the saltiness of the sea constant. And none of it would be possible without continental drift. What this potted history of Earth tells us is that if we wish to

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Tim Flannery

keep our planet ï¬†t for life, some of the most routine and humble things we do must change. For as long as we’ve existed, our conception of waste disposal has simply been shifting objectionable matter from one of Earth’s organs to another. Whether it’s been a human body or a banana skin, we’ve buried it (returning it to the earth), burned it (returning it to the atmosphere) or tossed it into the sea. On a small scale, this approach to waste disposal works pretty well. But it most decidedly will not do in the 21st century, for the very essence of much pollution derives from human actions that weaken the elemental imbalance between Earth’s organs. Over the vastness of geological time Gaia’s housekeeping has put every element in its place. Carbon has been withdrawn from the atmosphere by plants and geological processes, until just a few parts per 10Â€000 remain. Iron has been stripped from the seas by hungry plankton, as have mercury, lead, zinc, uranium and a great many other elements, all of which have been safely sequestered deep in Earth’s rocks. But now the human burrowers in the Earth have arrived, and, as we tunnel into those buried troves, we undo the work of aeons.

f Water p. 141 Earth’s crust p. 106 Climate p. 148

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How to keep the river flowing Jessica Weir

On a hot summer’s day in Mildura I was discussing the river sand mining industry with Muthi Muthi elder Mary Pappin. She asked, ‘Is this what you do when you’ve killed everything on top: you take out the minerals from underneath and sell them?’ Mary can always be counted on to go to the heart of the matter. Rarely reported in the current water debate are the experiences of the Aboriginal people whose ancestral country is the Murray River. They have as much to lose as anyone, if not more, with the devastation of the riverÂ€country. Aboriginal elders have seen the Murray River change dramatically over their lifetimes. They remember when they could drink fresh water straight from the river. In the Barmah Forest, a river red gum wetland on the Murray River near Echuca, Yorta Yorta elder Henry Atkinson told me how in the 1930s he lived with his family by eating and selling the native fish, mussels, Murray crayfish andÂ€turtles. The Barmah–Millewa forest is perhaps the most well-known river red gum forest along the Murray. This forest is kept alive by the unseasonal water flows from an upstream dam to farms which rely on irrigated water. Further west, on the dessicated floodplains of the arid country, the river red gum forests stand

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Jessica Weir

mute, grey and lifeless – a powerful image that has come to symbolise the destruction caused by the over-consumption of river water in a period of prolongedÂ€drought. The traditional owners of the river country have responded to the water crisis by forming an alliance known as MLDRIN – the Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations – along the Murray’s length. Ten traditional owner groups send two or more representatives to joint meetings which have also become a strategic forum for governments and others wishing to meet with some of the Murray’s firstÂ€people. This alliance is now into its second decade of communicating its concerns to governments and strategising its own water policies. I’ve been attending its meetings to see whether something can be learnt to help policymakers reconsider water management practices that have grossly failed our fresh-water ecologies, our future food security, and the viability of farms and country towns established on the irrigationÂ€industries. What I found at these meetings was that the different parties discussing river health assumed that they were all talking about the same thing when in fact they were talking past each other. When Yorta Yorta woman Monica Morgan and Muthi Muthi elder Jeanette Crew, both of whom have had a long association with MLDRIN, talk about this disjunction, they mention their gradual realisation that ‘natural resource management’ wasn’t the same as ‘caring forÂ€country’. Where traditional owners from the Murray River see humans as part of the continuum of ‘country’, the water managers were by and large seeing humans as essentially separate from and above the river – and in control ofÂ€it. ‘Country’ is a term used by Aboriginal people to describe the critical importance of their relationships with their traditional lands. Beyond understanding humanity as embedded within ecological webs of life, country also encompasses history, culture,

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How to keep the river flowing

religion, law, language, and more. Looking after country is looking afterÂ€yourself. Thinking along these lines, the MLDRIN delegates have developed their own approaches to water management, including the new idea of cultural flows. Henry Atkinson described cultural flows at a meeting of key community stakeholders in the Murray–Darling Basin. He said: ‘Cultural flows are a natural flow which allows everything to grow. Cultural flows include your history and your culture.’ For Henry, water as ‘cultural flow’ is the essential connecting life force in the river country, and by putting the needs of the river first, everything else is taken careÂ€of. Henry’s perspective does not position the environment and agriculture as conflicting agendas, but emphasises the importance of respecting the Murray first, before human needs, including agriculture, can be met. Similarly, environmental commentators from all around the Murray–Darling Basin state that we have to reduce the over-allocation of river water if we wish to see both the survival of the Basin ecologies and a sustainable future forÂ€ agriculture. ‘Environmental flows’ are a new policy response by governments to include water allocations for the environment in water management plans. This policy response acknowledges that there is a limit to how much water can be taken out of rivers for human consumption and that some water must be specifically allocated for river health. The federal government’s recent purchase of consumptive water licences to convert into environmental water allocations is the most explicit example of this policy inÂ€action. Yet environmental flows are strongly contested by people who see ‘the environment’ as a new competitor for scarce and expensive river water. Such arguments deny the fundamental logic that the river’s health is the source of the water. Still, even though

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Jessica Weir

‘environmental flow’ is an important policy, it has not challenged the existing decision-making framework: more is required than just adding the river to the list of waterÂ€users. The people who have spent their lives next to the rivers are now witnessing the loss of a river culture which they cannot pass on to their children. No longer can we find sustenance when camping by these billabongs. Indeed, at some places we are warned not to touch the water because it has become a toxic acidic mix. This landscape is no longer capable of inspiring the poetry which celebrates our national culture. A healthy river supports both our ecologies and our economies; a failing river offers neither, and its toxicity threatens and kills life. But to argue for the Murray as the key life force in the current context is to enter water management debates as a maverick, speaking a discordant language that jars with the dominant discourse, which is focused on securing water allocations and more efficient waterÂ€use. The conceptual leap that would allow people to understand what Henry, Mary, Monica, Jeanette and other MLDRIN members are saying about prioritising the life of country is not possible in discussions limited to a resource management practice which diverts, stores and allocates quantities of water. By not fitting in, the contributions Aboriginal people are making have been largely ignored or dismissed either as spiritual fancy or unscientific (orÂ€both). When the MLDRIN members talk about the primacy of country they are not being sentimental or irrelevant; they make an argument that resonates with common sense, scientific evidence, and the inherent productivity of living, healthy rivers. So yes, I did find that there is something policymakers can learn here, but I also think that until policymakers examine the dominant understandings of water, they will have a lot of trouble hearing what MLDRIN has toÂ€say.

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How to keep the river flowing

f Water p. 28 Earth p. 79 Culture p. 192

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Blame it on the Stones Rob Brooks

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Aldous Huxley, 1931

Music is the quintessence of culture, but it also has evolutionary roots that run deep. Music stimulates parts of our brains that first evolved for other purposes, but music-making has also evolved in its own right. It is especially important in courtship, and in learning to navigate the tricky social transition to adulthood. It may be the most complex and sophisticated courtship display in the animal kingdom.

q The Rolling Stones are the biggest, baddest rock and roll band of them all. (They may not have sold as many records as the Beatles or AC/DC, but they outlasted the Beatles by decades, and they were international megastars when the Young brothers were still wearing school uniforms.) Those of us born in or after the 1970s find it difficult to grasp just how huge the Stones were in the 1960s, and how chaotically insane the world around them must

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have been. Hysterical swarms of screaming fans plagued them at every public appearance, a constabulary intent on stamping out drugs by stamping on the Stones hounded them relentlessly, and just about every public commentator derided them scornfully. At the time, they were so aggressive, lascivious and degenerate they made the mop-topped smileyfaced Beatles look definitively clean-cut. But to an evolutionary biologist, the Stones exemplify a problem that screams out for an explanation. Why bother with all that rock and roll nonsense? Brian Jones, the talented multi-instrumentalist and flamboyant early driving force in the band, took way too many drugs, and became increasingly difficult to work with and unable to contribute to recordings and live performances. He aggressively fell out with band members and was eventually fired. He was soon dead: drowned – possibly murdered – in his swimming pool at the age of 27. Being a rock star did not accord Brian Jones a long and productive life. It is tempting to dismiss music as a purely cultural phenomenon and rock as an aberration of 20th-century culture, an arbitrary set of attitudes and chord changes stolen from the blues and passed from one rocker to another, modified only by inspiration. That is pretty much the kind of explanation that musicologists and cultural theorists have long favoured as they dissect the arcane details of who-copied-what-from-whom, interpreting the history of popular music in a mumbo-jumbo of postmodern critique. By contrast, an evolutionary biologist starts from the assumption that things don’t happen by themselves, especially things that dramatically increase your risk of dying, as rocking out certainly does. Anything as popular, exciting, sexy, deadly and – most of all – as difficult to do well needs an explanation. But we need to ask the right questions. We know rock is only two generations old. Asking how making and listening to music affects the repro-

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Rob Brooks

ductive fitness of individual musicians and audience members can only tell us part of the story. We also need to consider other evolutionary processes that have operated on individuals and their genes that might predispose something as sexy and dangerous as rock to shake, rattle and revolutionise the modern world. I want to debunk not only the idea that rock and other musical genres are exclusively cultural phenomena, but also the idea that there are any phenomena that are so exclusively cultural that our evolved biology is irrelevant. No sane person would argue that rock is not cultural: it is well known that rock arose in the 1950s out of existing musical traditions including rhythm and blues, folk, blues, jazz and country. It spread through learning and imitation, assisted by a special blend of social and economic circumstances that arose soon after World War II and the spread of technologies like commercial radio, record players and television. But even though rock is a quintessentially cultural phenomenon, it grew in the soil of our evolved biology. That is what makes it so utterly compelling, and why, a decade into the 21st century, it is still going so strong. Lesser art forms like disco, tantra, Morris dancing and macramé may tap into aspects of our biology, but they don’t have the same alchemic blend of sex, rebellion, anger, danger and freedom. That is why they are lesser art forms. Nothing short of that opium of the masses, religion, with which rock shares so many ritual similarities, even approaches rock music for cultural expression of raw human biology.

q It turns out that Brian Jones left a clue to the evolutionary problem posed by his early death. He fathered four children, each by a different mother. The other Stones who did not share Jones’ misfortune did mostly share his talent for proliferation. Stones’ guitarist Keith Richards, who to everybody’s amazement is still

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alive and playing at 68 years old, had five children with two different women. Vocalist Mick Jagger, twice married and famously philandering, has been linked in five different decades with some of the most desirable women on the planet, officially siring seven children by four different women. Although drummer Charlie Watts breaks the hyper-sexualised mould, Brian, Keith and Mick personify the fossilised footprint of a long history of sexually selected music-making in our species. None of these men can count themselves among the most prolific fathers of their time, but who knows what heights of paternity they might have scaled had not the 1960s also ushered in history’s biggest advances in contraception? The sheer number of fertile women who got up very close to the Stones, sometimes by the most ingenious of routes, is rivalled by very few men in history. Or as Keith Richards puts it, ‘You stood as much chance in a fucking river full of piranhas.’ Musicians overcome two of the biggest evolutionary problems that face people looking for a mate: meeting or being noticed by potential mates, and courting or seducing them. From the day a band plays its first live gig, band members are in the business of exposing themselves to potential mates – whether that is their intention or not. Musicians in small-time bands enjoy a slight advantage over their non-musical brethren in meeting and getting to know possible mates, and the more successful the band becomes, the bigger the audience at their gigs and the larger the pool of possible mates. If ancient musicians enjoyed even a fraction of the mating success of modern rock stars, then sexual selection on music-making abilities would have been sensationally strong throughout our evolutionary past. Men and women from a great many societies use music to privately court one another, from young singers at Saturday night love markets in the hill villages of northern Vietnam to the evening serenades of 18th-century Italy. Music-making, singing and

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Rob Brooks

dancing can also be very public displays of prowess. According to Radiohead, ‘Anyone can play guitar’, but a world of pawned guitars, amps and drum kits tells a different story. Learning to play a musical instrument is no trivial task, and only a tiny fraction of those who begin reach any level of proficiency. The fact that so many great rock musicians are self-taught only shows that rock music and the instruments of choice are well suited to let people with limited means and opportunity realise what talent and motivation they have. When all the elements work together we have one of the living world’s greatest sexual displays. The notion of music as a sexual display explains much more than why we bother making music – it also explains why music can be so sublime that its power transcends mere description. Natural selection usually favours sober functionality: teeth that cut and grind food, day in and day out, lasting as long as our ancestors could have hoped to survive; bones strong enough to support an active body but not so sturdy that they become too heavy; and a gut that wrings every last morsel of nourishment from every meal. But attractiveness is different – it keeps on evolving. Genes that make an individual attractive can, in a very few generations, come to be so common that whatever was attractive 10 generations ago might be merely ordinary today. As [evolutionary psychologist] Geoffrey Miller puts it: ancestral hominid-Hendrixes could never say, ‘OK, our music’s good enough, we can stop now’, because they were competing with all the hominid-Eric-Claptons, hominidJerry-Garcias, and hominid-John-Lennons. The aesthetic and emotional power of music is exactly what we would expect from sexual selection’s arms race to impress minds like ours.

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Teen spirit The first album I ever bought with my own money was U2’s Under a Blood Red Sky. I was 13, and all my high school friends were playing it. Thirteen is a typical age to start buying your own music and asserting your own musical tastes. In early adolescence people stop becoming passive consumers of the music their parents and older siblings are playing, and start forming their own musical tastes. Our sexual and social identities and our musical tastes are shaped in adolescence and early adulthood, and it is no accident that sex and music cosily knit themselves together at this time. As an interesting thought experiment, quickly think of one of your favourite songs and try to remember when you first heard it. When I did this exercise I immediately thought of ‘Losing my Religion’ by REM, long one of my favourite bands. When I heard it first I was 21, on a holiday with university friends. I was hooked by its unusual mandolin riff and consumed by its dark unrequited longing. (That was very definitely me in the corner, and in the spotlight.) Research on memory shows that people recall more personal events from early adulthood than from later adulthood or childhood – something psychologists call the reminiscence bump. A recent study by Steve Janssen at the University of Amsterdam shows that the bands and songs people remember most clearly and fondly in middle age are the ones they came to love between the ages of 16 and 21 – late adolescence and early adulthood. By contrast, when asked to name favourite books and movies, people favour more recent works. The strong musical reminiscence bump between 16 and 21 years of age makes sense because our relationship with music really gets going when we enter puberty, and becomes most intense from then through to early adulthood. This is no coincidence. It is the music that plays when we fall in love, when our hearts break, when we discover

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sex and learn the meaning of true friendship. It is the soundtrack to which we find our way through the most important and perilous transition since the day we left our mother’s womb and entered the loud, bright, air-breathing outside world.

Remembering sex The vast role that popular music plays in the lives of teenagers and young adults as they begin to navigate the world of men, women, infatuation, love and sex reinforces the fact that music derives much of its power from courtship and mating. But what of the elderly and, ahem, the middle-aged? Some of our strongest memories in middle and old age involve a song that was playing when we first met, danced with, or made love to a special somebody. The reminiscence bump in which we most fondly remember the music of our early adulthood, as we stood on the threshold of our sexual prime, again reinforces the tight link between our musical and sexual identities. Even well into old age, people report that music helps them to understand and develop their identity, connect with others, maintain their wellbeing and express their spirituality. This is, apart from some differences in emphasis, pretty much the role that music plays in the lives of the young. The difference is that the middle-aged and the elderly listen with a sense of reminiscence and sometimes of regret for a lost youth, a sense that does not yet encumber the young. That is why we pay big money to attend reunion concerts or see long-forgotten acts from the dark side of our youth. The Australian humorist – and one of my favourite writers – Mark Dapin, pointed me to this quote, which he believes may apply to all reunion concerts. It comes from a piece by the modern historian Timothy Garton Ash, writing about the audience at a reunion of the 1960s Czech pop group the Golden Kids:

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Sometimes they clap along. But when the Golden Kids sing ‘Suzanne’ there’s just total silence … Tense and heavy with regret: the silence of the middle-aged remembering sex.

f Music p. 162 Stones p. 106 Sex p. 62

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In the age of fishes Nyssa Skilton

Buried beneath an unsealed road on the outskirts of the NSW town of Canowindra lies a story that has waited about 375 million years to be told. Parts of the tale have emerged: how a drought dried an ancient billabong, leaving thousands of strange, armoured fish to die in the baking sun. And how a flood or winds quickly covered them with sediment, which later turned to rock and preserved them like a snapshot. But the palaeontologist who worked to unearth more than 4000 of these fossils in 1993 is certain there is more to the story. One of Australia’s foremost fossil experts, Dr Alex Ritchie, believes that waiting at the bottom of the billabong are animals with feet – three-dimensional examples of how fish crawled onto the land: We know these animals have been around longer than this, so it’s a fair guess that in this pool there were probably things with feet as well as fins. It would be a world-class discovery … that’s my dream. I have a slightly biased opinion: I want it to happen while I’m still alive and I don’t want somebody else to have kudos of proving me right.

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Scientists know tetrapods, or four-legged vertebrates, emerged from a group of lobe-finned fishes during the Devonian period, between about 415 million and 360 million years ago. In January 2010, researchers published an article in the journal Nature describing the oldest evidence of footprints, dating back to the early Middle Devonian period, about 395 million years ago. The footprints, discovered in a quarry in Poland, were described at the time as being as significant as ‘the first footprint of Neil Armstrong on the moon’. Ritchie says the Polish discovery shows there is a 10 or 15-million-year gap in our knowledge of tetrapod skeletons. ‘It’s obviously a much more complicated story than we suspected … and we’ve got the chance to solve part of it here if I’m right,’ he says. The discovery of the Canowindra fossil bed occurred in 1956 by chance, while council workers were straightening a dangerous bend in the unsealed road between Canowindra and Gooloogong. A bulldozer driver overturned a great slab of rock and saw that it was covered with unusual markings. He pushed it clear of the road and propped it against a fence. Weeks later a local beekeeper and carpenter spotted the rock while tending to his nearby beehives and contacted the Australian Museum in Sydney. The museum’s palaeontologist at the time, Harold Fletcher, and his friend, Dr Ted Rayner, arrived to inspect the slab and soon realised it was one of the most remarkable fossil discoveries made in Australia. Thick with fish, the slab contained more than 100 complete specimens. The scientists quickly arranged for the slab to be transported to Sydney for scientific study and display. The site at Canowindra remained untouched for another 37 years, until Fletcher’s successor, Ritchie, secured a 22-tonne excavator and driver from the Cabonne Council and unearthed the remainder of the fossil bed. What he found blew him away. With the help of students, farmers, business people, scientists and other members of the

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Nyssa Skilton

Canowindra community, Ritchie dug up an estimated 70 tonnes of rock, crammed with at least eight different kinds of remarkably well-preserved fishes, some more than 1.6 metres long and several species new to science. Two types of fishes dominated – the armoured Bothriolepis and Remigolepis – but the largest found were the air-breathing, lobe-finned sarcopterygians, which included the ancestors of the first vertebrates to step onto dry land. The Age of Fishes Museum now stands towards the end of Canowindra’s main road, about a two and a half hours’ drive from Canberra. The museum, which is open seven days a week and receives about 10Â€000 visitors a year, contains some of the most significant fossils from the site, including the original slab uncovered during the roadworks. But the story does not yet have a happy ending. The manager of the museum and the only paid staff member, Fiona Ferguson, is working to find appropriate storage for the fossils embedded in the more than 50 tonnes of sandstone slabs not displayed at the museum. They now lie in the Canowindra showground’s grandstand in ‘deplorable conditions’: stacked on pallets only accessible using a forklift. ‘I’m not sure what the government’s logic is, but as a community and regional resource and as an educational resource, I don’t understand why this is ignored,’ Ferguson says. She wants to see a storage facility built behind the museum to house all the fossils, making them accessible to visitors and scientists. She says the completed building has been costed at about $500â•›000. ‘We’re just missing out on: one, educational opportunities for everybody; two, the safety of a collection that’s one of its kind; and [three,] being able to let the scientific community in to have free access to something that they would [otherwise] never have.’ Ferguson would also like to see the museum linked with an institutional partner, as it was with the Australian Museum in Sydney until the partnership fell apart just over five years ago. Ritchie says the Australian Museum would be the natural

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choice as a partner to the Age of Fishes, but its management ‘washed their hands of it, and handed it over to local council’. ‘I think that’s grossly irresponsible, as the person who dug the thing up. It’s a potential international treasure,’ he says. ‘The council’s done a great job, and all credit to them, but really … this is too big for a local council.’ The Australian Museum’s assistant director of research and collections, Dr Brian Lassig, said in a written statement that the museum did not provide funding directly to the Age of Fishes Museum, but helped regional museums in a variety of other ways, including loan of objects for displays, and provision of technical and expert advice. Over the past 15 years, the Australian Museum has received funds earned by Ritchie, and donated funds, and is holding them in a trust to support scientific research on the Canowindra fish fossils. The Australian Museum makes these funds available to Ritchie, who holds an honorary position at the museum, for specific project work related to the site. Lassig said most of this funding had been spent, and the Museum now had only limited funds (less than $15Â€000) for the research. This money could be used to support further work at Canowindra. ‘The Australian Museum does not have additional funds available for a major excavation and research program at Canowindra,’ he said. Ritchie says they have only found the edge of the billabong, and he has no idea how deep it extends into the ground. In 1993, he had access to the excavator for 10 days and had to reluctantly cover the site up with plastic, hay, soil and rocks. There could be 10â•›000, 20â•›000 or even more fishes that gathered at the centre of the billabong in a futile bid to survive 375 million years ago. ‘It’s an incredible deposit and there’s nothing like it anywhere in the world on this scale, nicely packaged, waiting to be dug up, within easy access from the road, within easy access of major towns.’ Ritchie wants to reroute the road beneath which

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Nyssa Skilton

the fishes are buried, and open up the site with a building so people can not only see the place where the fish died, but also watch them continue to be unearthed. Aged 74, his frustration over wanting to see what remains in the ground at the Canowindra site is growing. But the one thing fossil hunting teaches is patience. ‘You never know, when you split a rock, what you’re going to find,’ he says. ‘That’s what keeps you going, because you can dig for a long time if you convince yourself the next rock you find will have something unique, different, special.’ But Ritchie’s first priority is to finish the museum. His vision is of an Age of Fishes Museum that displays fossil fishes through the entire geological record, drawing tens of thousands of tourists to the region each year. Also, the Canowindra site has enough surplus fossils so that they can be exchanged with other museums and collectors around the world. The museum could be part of a fossil trail which links to the original fossil site as well as to another fossil treasure trove at Merriganowry quarry, about 30 kilometres out of Cowra. The shale quarry contains an ‘inexhaustible’ supply of the bottomdwelling fish, Cowralepis mclachlani. Through the lens of the Canowindra story, people could learn about and uncover for themselves the history of evolution. ‘I’ve found some of the oldest fishes in the world, I’ve found great things,’ Ritchie says. ‘If I have to leave a legacy, something that will be visited, admired by people, will educate people and entertain people for centuries to come, [Canowindra’s Age of Fishes Museum] has to be it, if it’s done properly.’

f Fossils p. 126 Local heroes p. 32 Money p. 1

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Tiger by the tail Robert Reid

When I clawed the shark I bent over the pole and whack, the pole smashed me across the face, knocking me out. The next thing I know, I’m waking up flat on my back in the bottom of the dinghy with someone bending over me.

It was possibly the world’s most unusual shark-attack injury, but for 37-year-old marine scientist Richard Fitzpatrick it was all in a day’s work, and he considered himself lucky to get off so lightly. His expensive sunnies were broken, he complained, but his face was intact. The first words he uttered when regaining consciousness were, not surprisingly: ‘That hurt!’ Fitzpatrick and a team of shark researchers were working in waters off Raine Island, on the extreme northern tip of Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef, on a mission to capture tiger sharks and attach satellite ‘splash’ tags to monitor their migration patterns. It is an ongoing scientific program Fitzpatrick heads to learn more about the dangerous predator’s habits and how best to protect what scientists claim is a rapidly declining population. The 3.5-metre female shark – nicknamed ‘K.O.’ for obvious reasons – was too heavy to lift into the boat and so the transmitter

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tag was attached to her dorsal fin in the water, using an electric drill – which Fitzpatrick is adamant doesn’t hurt the animal. To show there were no hard feelings, he got in the water and ‘rode her free’ after the tagging operation. Luring and capturing the tigers unharmed inspired Fitzpatrick to invent a unique device he named the ‘shark claw’ – in effect a type of large handcuff on the end of a 2.5-metre pole. Once the shark is enticed to the side of a research dinghy using fish bait, Fitzpatrick swings into action with the claw, manoeuvring it over the shark’s wildly threshing tail. A mechanism then snap-locks the claw in place and the shark is harmlessly caught for the tagging procedure that follows. The pole is designed to detach from the claw, which is attached to a rope and a large float. The shark drags the float through the water until it tires and stops swimming. ‘The claw has to hit in exactly the right place, so the timing has to be perfect for it to be effective,’ Fitzpatrick explained. ‘This technique is quicker and much less stressful to the animal – and to me! – than the tail-roping routine I previously used.’ Fitzpatrick says being knocked out by the pole was ‘not in the script’ but the invention has improved the safety factor considerably: ‘There are still hairy moments, but the claw has made things a lot less dangerous.’ That is, a lot less dangerous than his former method of catching sharks, which was to lasso them and ride on their backs, earning him the title of the ‘shark cowboy’ or – to his American scientific colleagues – the ‘professional shark wrangler’. ‘I developed a technique you could call an underwater shark rodeo, where we would attract a shark with a crate of fish bait, and while it was interested in the food, I’d grab hold of its tail and slip a rope noose around it,’ he explained. ‘I was the first in the world to rope sharks – no one else was dumb enough to do it!’ Fitzpatrick discovered that with certain sharks, such as the

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whitetip reef shark, he could quieten them by squeezing their tails, a manoeuvre he said had labelled him ‘either loony or stupid’: I found that by squeezing the tail, for some reason the shark stops threshing. There seems to be a pressure point, so when you press down on it, the shark relaxes. I used to just grab and crash-tackle the sharks, but then it was hard to measure them, so it evolved into the tail-rope technique, and then the claw. It was a process of learning. If you’re not wearing a wetsuit they can rip a layer of your skin off while threshing around. That’s one of the more dangerous aspects of this business.

q Richard Fitzpatrick has been handling sharks all his adult life. He kept cat sharks in a tank at home as a child and grew up snorkelling and experimenting with underwater photography. As a 20-year-old he worked as a biologist at Sydney’s Manly Aquarium, where he studied shark reproductive behaviour, swimming with them daily and, among other tasks, taking blood samples to analyse female hormone levels. During this period he was ‘bitten twice by grey nurse sharks because I was mucking around, thinking I was bulletproof!’ He also took his chances at the Maui Ocean Centre in Hawaii and at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority’s headquarters in Townsville. But it was those places further out in the ocean, where wild sharks roam free, that fascinated the young scientist. Repeated visits to reefs off the Queensland coast eventually set alarm bells ringing, as he realised shark numbers seemed to be falling. He wondered why, and decided to find out. He soon discovered that the task wasn’t going to be easy. Early

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research led him to the conclusion that very little was known about the movements and habits of sharks in the Great Barrier Reef and the Coral Sea. Fitzpatrick committed his future research to what he termed ‘The Case of the Disappearing Sharks’, with himself as chief shark detective. ‘We discovered that sharks in the Great Barrier Reef – the world’s best-protected marine area – had declined by 80 per cent, and we needed to understand more about these animals and how we could protect them.’ Fitzpatrick embarked on a shark-tagging project that encompassed two main areas – Osprey Reef in the Coral Sea, where a variety of reef sharks congregate in large numbers, and Raine Island, the largest green turtle rookery in the world, where tiger sharks come to feast on the unfortunate animals. Such an ambitious scientific program is expensive, so Fitzpatrick had to figure out a way to finance the project. Over time he managed to secure government funding. He also turned to private enterprise to help out, enlisting the aid of an emerging industry – ecotourism. ‘Tour boat operators took us out on trips and we discovered that many tourists were willing to pay a fee to be involved in our research and support shark conservation.’ Fitzpatrick also used his award-winning cinematography expertise to produce documentaries on his shark expeditions, shooting them on commission for clients such as the BBC, National Geographic and Discovery channels. At Osprey Reef, Fitzpatrick and his team of researchers continue their long-running shark capture-and-release tagging program. Osprey is a remote reef 160 kilometres off the North Queensland coast. It is a true seamount, with waters plunging 1200 metres off the edges of the reef. While it is outside the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, and therefore not protected, its isolation has ensured the reef ’s healthy shark population remains

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stable. It is a haven for a diversity of sharks, including whitetip, grey reef, silvertip and hammerhead sharks. It was at Osprey that Fitzpatrick pioneered his ‘cowboy’ style of tail-roping a shark in the water, squeezing its tail to calm it, and then hauling it on board into a plastic ‘kiddie pool’, where he surgically inserts a tiny radio transmitter under the belly skin. Then he sews up the incision and releases the shark. The transmitter then sends information to a network of underwater receivers strategically placed around the reef, which record the identity, position and depth of the shark. But the sharks – mostly whitetips up to 2 metres in length – don’t always co-operate, and a team of helpers hold the animal as still as possible while the ‘surgeon’ does his work. ‘They’re calm when I squeeze the tail, but they’re kicking and biting machines when brought on board. You have to watch where you put your hands. They’re small, but incredibly powerful and quick.’ Fitzpatrick has a reminder of this on his leg: a bite mark left as a souvenir from one of his ‘specimens’. ‘It was only a little male shark, but I had him tail-roped at the time so he had a pretty good reason to turn around and bite me. My leg got in its way, he grabbed it and hung on. We call it a dead dog bite!’ Fitzpatrick’s monitoring program shows the reef sharks at Osprey are ‘stay at home’ animals, with a range of only 1–2 kilometres and, therefore, he says, extremely vulnerable to threats from fishing. ‘These sharks we’re looking at are live bearers, so basically, where they are born they stay. Fishing could wipe out the entire population of Osprey Reef in two weeks, and because the closest reef is 60 kilometres away, there would be no other sharks to replace them.’ Two months after each expedition, Fitzpatrick and his team return to Osprey Reef and try to recapture the tagged sharks and add to their long-term profile of their behaviour. But it was inevi-

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table that the adventurous and dedicated scientist would set his sights on bigger – and more dangerous – research subjects. ‘After working with smaller sharks for a few years I set myself a new challenge – working with the mighty tiger shark. Reef sharks are strong, but being the largest tropical predatory shark, tigers are a new ball game!’ They certainly are. Regarded as one of the top three mankillers in the world, tiger sharks show no discrimination when it comes to food. They eat just about anything that will fit in their mouths. Humans may not be their favourite food, but they don’t know that until they take a bite! Fitzpatrick selected Raine Island as his ideal tiger shark ‘laboratory’ because of the vast numbers of green turtles that congregate there. In November, an incredible 14Â€000 have been known to go ashore and nest in a single night. The sand cay, which is less than 3 kilometres long, is a gourmet magnet for marauding tiger sharks. As the turtles come in to nest, the tigers come in to eat them. ‘They basically ambush their defenceless targets,’ Fitzpatrick said. ‘The turtles are swimming hamburgers for the tigers.’ The research expedition’s mission was to discover where the predators went after leaving Raine Island, and that could be achieved only by attaching the satellite tags. The tag is activated by a saltwater switch each time the shark’s dorsal fin breaks the surface, allowing scientists to track its movements for several months. The ongoing research is reaping important scientific rewards: the satellite tags have revealed some fascinating new information about the lives of tiger sharks. We now know that they do cover huge distances after leaving Raine Island, travelling in all directions. For shark management, this kind of information is essential, as it helps match the most appropriate conservation plans with the behaviour of the species. For most large migratory species like sharks, current marine parks cover only small sections of their habitat. The shark data suggests that we must rethink and

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find more realistic methods to protect these ocean wanderers. Fitzpatrick believes sharks – even the dangerous ones – are misunderstood creatures portrayed by the media as ‘monsters of the ocean’, an image they don’t deserve. The media in Australia has a lot to answer for. The level of attention they give shark stories is unwarranted and gives the wrong impression. The chances of an attack on a human are astronomically small. People would be absolutely amazed at the number of sharks that swim past beach swimmers every year and don’t even give them a second glance. Fitzpatrick is realistic about his role in protecting shark species and their habitat, and his method of educating the public: I make shark documentaries, so I’m part of the problem too. The docos are made using bait in the water, so what you’re seeing is not natural. If I made a completely natural doco about sharks, people would fall asleep. All you would see would be 99.9 per cent blue water! Nothing else! In the distance you might see a shadow, but that is the reality of a real shark doco. We’re part of the hype, but we’re trying to get the message out that sharks aren’t all nasty dangerous things: they are actually beautiful animals and they’ve got a right to be out there.

f Local heroes p. 106 Killers p. 68 Beauty p. 180

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Gone viral Frank Bowden

My mother had scarlet fever as a young girl. She lived through epidemics of whooping cough, measles and polio, and her personal experience made her quite neurotic about germs. She would make me wash my hands if I handled money – coins or notes, it didn’t matter. She was going to cancel my brother’s 10th birthday party because he had a cold, and she wouldn’t let him blow out the candles on the cake because of the risk of ‘viral icing contamination’, until my godmother saved the day by cutting out a protective paper ‘condom’ for the cake so just the tops of the candles showed. My mother made me put toilet paper on any ‘foreign’ toilet seat before I sat on it, and I even had to float a layer of tissue on the water in the bowl at home to minimise the risk of a splash on to my naked bottom. There was no 3-second rule in our household – if any part of a tea towel touched the floor for even an instant it was immediately dispatched to the washing machine. A cracked cup went straight in the bin because of the risk of catching TB from it (I have absolutely no idea where that one came from). Dogs were walking culture media to my mum – a pat followed by hand-washing was acceptable, but if I was licked on the face she would try to dab out the slobber from my mouth with her handkerchief.

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We never ate rabbit in our household because Mum knew that they all had myxomatosis. To my father’s protests she would simply reply, ‘If it can kill those poor little bunnies …’ Food was never reheated in the oven, and a can that had a dint in it would be thrown away, as it was well known, she told me, that you could get ptomaine poisoning – whatever that was – from such damaged containers. Our meals were never left uncovered for even a moment in case a fly landed and unloaded its deadly payload of detritus. In fact, my mum may have been the person that the copywriters had in mind when they invented Louie the Fly – our house was more likely to smell of Mortein than Chanel No. 5. When I came home from a game of football during the winter she would run a bath and add two capfuls of Dettol to sterilise any residual dirt from the playing field that might be clinging to me. Her favourite antiseptic was acriflavine, a yellow liquid which she carefully applied to even the most minor of our cuts and abrasions, all of which would be carefully covered by a plastic band-aid. (I haven’t seen a bottle of acriflavine for years. Derived from coal tar, this topical antiseptic was discovered by Paul Ehrlich in 1912 – around the same time he discovered Salvarsan, the first effective antimicrobial agent for syphilis.) Contagion was, by far, highest on her list of worries. For although she lived in constant fear of me ‘catching something’, she would let me, as a scrawny 10-year-old with a school bag that weighed more than I did, catch a bus from our home in Ashwood to Box Hill station, then a train to Camberwell and finally walk a kilometre to my school. I was a boy in a bubble of maternal microbiological anxiety and I often wonder how my mother would have coped if she knew that I grew up to be an infectious diseases specialist. (There is no such thing as coincidence, a friend once told me, alluding to the deep psychological forces which he believed had pushed me in that particular vocational direction.)

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My mum was at the far end of the germ-phobic spectrum, but most members of her generation possessed a healthy reverence for micro-organisms, based on things that they had seen with their own eyes. They had parents who had succumbed to pneumonia, friends who had died after a simple cut had turned into an abscess and then into ‘blood poisoning’. My father, who wasn’t frightened of many things, always told me that I must never pick a pimple on my face if it was above the level of my upper lip. He didn’t know why, he just knew that something bad could happen if you did (and he was right: infections on the upper part of the face can spread to a vein that traverses the brain, causing meningitis and stroke). When he was a teenager, his mother lived in fear of him contracting polio during the 1938 epidemic in Melbourne – the year they closed the schools and came close to putting barricades on the bridges over the Yarra. My grandparents’ generation embraced antibiotics and vaccinations as soon as they became available because they could see a direct benefit – they didn’t need to imagine what a child with whooping cough or diphtheria looked like. They had lived it. The relationship between humans and pathogens is one of the most fascinating stories of evolution. Our species had to evolve in a world that was swarming with invisible micro-organisms that would kill us if we had not developed an effective immune system. We are, you see, literally outnumbered. There were, at last count, 750 trillion (that’s 750 million million) bacteria in the average human gut, but there are only about 100 trillion cells in the human body. The protective adaptations that have occurred over millions of years can be rapidly subverted by social changes that human societies can make in the space of a generation. New infectious diseases emerge as a result of alterations in the way humans congregate in cities and towns and how they interact with each other, as much as by modifications of the genetic structure of bacteria and viruses that make them more virulent or contagious.

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Often, the interventions that led to the control of infectious diseases have been victims of their own success – the improvements in sanitation and housing that came with prosperity, the development of vaccines, and the discovery of antibacterial and antiviral agents changed the face of medicine in the 20th century. In the developed world, infectious diseases receded as cancer, heart disease and chronic diseases took over. Diseases which are now only seen by specialists like me (and even then only rarely) are usually invisible to the general population, and the relationship between an intervention and the disappearance of a disease is often not appreciated. For those of us who have treated children and adults with life-threatening infections that could have been avoided by immunisation, it is very hard to remain calm in the face of widespread anti-scientific, anti-vaccination advocacy.

f Disease p. 44 Being human p. 50 Parents p. 28

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Skin feeders Katherine Fleming

Tonight, as you sink wearily into bed, you won’t be alone – even if you’re the only person in the room. Under your slumbering head, the pillow will teem with potentially thousands of unseen bedmates, feasting on your fallen skin flakes. The good news is they don’t bite. The bad news is they’ll be procreating, defecating, dying and decomposing in your bedding, couches, carpets and clothes. Essentially, we all spend a good deal of time wallowing in dust-mite filth. The humble dust mite – the species Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus is most common in Australia – is an arachnid, a relative of spiders and ticks. It’s less than half a millimetre long but what it lacks in size, it makes up for in abundance. The detritus in our old pillows is made up mostly of sloughed skin, but the microscopic dust mites, alive and dead, are also there in their thousands, along with mite dung. CSIRO entomology researcher Dr Matthew Colloff, author of the book Dust Mites, puts the numbers of dead dust mites (only about 5 per cent are alive) in an average bed at between 100Â€000 and more than 1 million, depending on conditions. ‘If you’re above 500 mites per gram of dust, which contains skin scales, organic debris, mould, ash, crumbs and all sorts of things, you’re

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getting into pretty high mite numbers,’ he explains. ‘The highest ever recorded [level] was about 12Â€000 per gram. Now, if you make a circle with your thumb and index finger, a gram of dust would fit in there, so imagine 12Â€000 mites in that kind of space.’ The fact that our skin scales are their main food source means generally, wherever we are, they are, says Dr Peter Dingle, Associate Professor in Murdoch University’s School of Environmental Science. ‘We shed literally millions of skin cells every day but they have to be dehydrated and de-fatted by mould,’ he explains. ‘The mites wait for the mould to attack and then they feed on both.’

q Complex fats and proteins also make skin scales tough to digest, says Matthew, but the mites have chambers in their gut that act as fermentation tanks. ‘They probably have skin scales sloshing around in an enzyme soup for prolonged periods,’ he says. ‘It’s like skin-enzyme porridge.’ A seemingly less advantageous evolutionary quirk involves breeding. Dust mites mate for 24 hours at a time, probably because the male’s penis is only about as wide as the sperm. ‘Our best guess is that mating is so prolonged because the sperm is coming out more or less single file,’ Matthew says. ‘Why it would have evolved like that, no one knows.’ In optimal conditions mites live for about six weeks, each producing about 20 faecal pellets a day; females lay about 30 eggs during their life span. During weeks, months and years, the debris formed by live and dead mites and their waste accumulates. It’s the faecal pellets – just 20 microns across and easily inhaled when bed-making or vacuuming make them airborne – and the mites’ decomposing bodies that cause problems for humans. This material contains a series of proteins that are highly allergenic for susceptible people, causing everything from

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sneezing, itchy eyes and a blocked, runny nose to a severe asthma attack. There are about 20 known allergens and most, but not all, occur in the mites’ faeces.

q Dr Janet Rimmer, a respiratory physician and director of the National Asthma Council Australia, says about 45 per cent of the Australian population suffer from allergies, and of those about 80 per cent are allergic to dust mites. While they’re most dangerous to the 20–30 per cent of us with asthma, they don’t always cause asthmatics to be allergic. And not all people allergic to dust mites have asthma. Historical studies of asthmatics being taken into hospitals or sanitariums have produced variable results. ‘Those were obviously lower dust-mite environments and some people got better, but not everybody did,’ Jane says. ‘Dustmite allergens are playing a role, but we don’t always know how much.’ The mites’ role in allergies wasn’t discovered until the mid-1960s, and early investigations into reducing the effect on allergies and asthma by cutting exposure were hampered by social stigma – people then had no knowledge of mite allergens. ‘The news that their homes were infested with mites which were making their children sick may have reduced their compliance with interventions,’ Matthew says. Since then, extensive research has failed to yield a cure. A 2008 review compiled for the international Cochrane medical database found none of the research measures to reduce exposure to house dust mites had any discernible benefit for asthmatics. ‘After pouring bucketloads of money into dust mites in the late 1980s and 1990s, I think the funding bodies got fed up with it because it hasn’t been solved, so they’ve gone on to things that are more sexy,’ Matthew says. ‘But dust mites are still a huge public health problem and we haven’t cracked it. There’s a lot we still don’t know.’

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f Sleeping p. 12 Skin p. 75

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Once were dinosaurs John Pickrell

If you could step back to the late Jurassic, 160 million years ago, and conceal yourself in the prehistoric foliage of Mongolia, you would see something remarkable. Between the tree ferns and cycads, an unusual-looking bird would appear. It tidies up a clearing – removing leaves, sticks and other debris. Then, with a dramatic flourish, the pigeon-sized creature stands on tiptoes, puffs up its strikingly coloured plumage, and starts to jerkily dance from side to side, all the while producing clicks and shrill little calls. Most conspicuous are its four long tail feathers, which flick and waft as it shimmies to an internal beat. This is actually a courtship ritual, very much like the kind played out by birds of paradise today in New Guinea. But the performer isn’t a bird at all. It doesn’t have wings, but lightly feathered forelimbs with sharp little claws; and instead of a beak, it has a full set of pointy teeth. What you are spying on is actually a small dinosaur named Epidexipteryx, Greek for ‘display feather’. A delicately preserved fossil of Epidexipteryx hui, featuring impressions of four 20-centimetre-long, ribbon-like feathers, was unearthed in Inner Mongolia in 2007, and described in the British journal Nature the following year. It was the first clue that feathers found a use in display long before they ever helped a

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creature become airborne. The scenario above is fanciful, but the paper’s authors, at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, are convinced the feathers were used for seduction. ‘Ornamental plumage is used to send signals essential to a wide range of avian behaviour patterns, particularly relating to courtship,’ they write. ‘It is highly probable that the [tail feathers] of Epidexipteryx similarly had display as their primary function.’ This fossil is one small pebble of proof in an avalanche of evidence that has emerged over the last 15 years, confirming that birds are the descendants of theropod dinosaurs (the majority of the bipedal carnivorous species) and that, in some ways, they were very bird-like. There is now good evidence that even fearsome and well-known species – such as Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus – had feathers. ‘The most startling revelation about Velociraptor and its kin is that many are now known to have possessed feathers. This fact has made us think again not only about the transition to birds, but also about how they might have used their feathers,’ says Australian palaeontologist John Long in his book Feathered Dinosaurs (CSIRO Publishing, 2008). ‘Did they use feathers in complex mating rituals? Did they use them to brood their young? Or did feathers act primarily as a stepping-stone in the evolution of flight? We know from fossil evidence that some of these scenarios, and possibly all of them, were true.’ Mark Norell is the curator of palaeontology at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York. He was the co-author of a 2007 study that reappraised Velociraptor arm bones to show they have ‘quill knobs’ – pits where, in today’s birds, the feathers are attached with ligaments. ‘The more that we learn about these animals, the more we find that there is basically no difference between birds and their closely related dinosaur ancestors,’ says Norell. ‘Both have wishbones, brooded their nests, possess hollow bones and were covered in feathers. If animals such

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as Velociraptor were alive today, our first impression would be that they were just very unusual-looking birds.’ Though somewhat more terrifying than your average sparrow. If dinosaurs did develop feathers before flight, what purpose did they serve? How did feathers evolve, and how did a group of animals that includes the 6-tonne T. rex ever take off from the ground? To answer these questions, we need to plunge into the deepest depths of the Jurassic and dig through the mountain of clues recently unearthed.

q Archaeopteryx, often called ‘the first bird’, was discovered in a slab of Bavarian limestone in 1861, just two years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The creature, which dates from the late Jurassic (150 million years ago), shared many features with theropod dinosaurs, such as teeth and a long bony tail. But it was unmistakably a bird, and had perching feet and well-developed flight feathers. Staunch Darwin supporter Thomas Huxley was one of the first to popularise the idea that birds were descended from dinosaurs. For almost a century following the discovery of Archaeopteryx, however, few other fossils illuminating the transition between dinosaurs and birds emerged. In the 1970s, Russian palaeontologist Sergei Kurzanov found a fossil of a bipedal, beaked dinosaur in the Mongolian desert. It bore so many similarities to birds that he named it Avimimus portentosus: ‘the amazing bird mimic’. At the time he argued that the 70-centimetre-tall species had the same quill knobs for feather attachment that were later found on Velociraptor, but there was no other evidence at that time for feathered dinosaurs, so the discovery was largely overlooked. John Ostrom, a softly spoken Yale University geologist, continued to rally support for the idea that theropod dinosaurs were

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warm-blooded and bird-like. He was way ahead of his time, predicting in the 1970s that evidence would be found that birds had evolved from small, fast, predatory dinosaurs with rapid metabolic rates. Some experts at the time even subscribed to a theory that birds had evolved from unknown, primitive, tree-dwelling reptiles – and that the skeletal similarities to dinosaurs were superficial. It wasn’t until 1996, when another fossil emerged out of a remarkably rich deposit in China’s northeastern province of Liaoning, that experts realised just how bird-like theropod dinosaurs had been. Sinosauropteryx prima sent shockwaves through the palaeontological community. It was clearly a dinosaur, but the fossil revealed that it had been almost totally covered with downy feathers. Also visible in the preservation were the remains of a small mammal in the gut, and eggs in the oviduct. The New York Times reported in October 1996 that, prior to formal publication (and despite attempts by Chinese authorities to censor it), a photo of the fossil was brought to a meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology at the AMNH, where it generated great excitement. Ostrom said the photo left him ‘in a state of shock’, and that the discovery was ‘the biggest event in evolutionary science since Darwin put forth his theory’. Lawrence Witmer, an anatomist at Ohio University, is famous for studying dinosaur fossils with computer tomography (CT) scans. In a recent commentary in Nature, he recalled that ‘before the 1990s, life was simple: feathers were thought to be an exclusively avian attribute, found in all birds today and extending back to the iconic Archaeopteryx’. However, ‘the discovery of very bird-like feathers … in some of the predatory theropod dinosaurs found in Liaoning (such as Caudipteryx and Microraptor) rocked the scientific world, because the feathered dinosaurs were outside the evolutionary group of acknowledged birds’.

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Since the discovery of Sinosauropteryx, at least 24 dinosaur species have been identified as having feathers of some kind, even if they were very primitive – more what palaeontologists endearingly call ‘dinofuzz’ than anything we’d recognise today. The spread of these species across the family tree suggests that the trait was common, even in species with no evidence of feathers. But it took a long time to find fossils with feathers, since 90 per cent of sites only preserve bones, says Long, formerly at Museum Victoria in Melbourne, but recently moved to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. For a long time, we only had Archaeopteryx, he says, ‘but in the last 10 years, a whole series of great fossils have been discovered of both feathered dinosaurs from a variety of theropod families, right through to many examples of primitive birds. The overall body of evidence from all different directions – growth rates, physiology, bone structure, feathers – points to these dinosaurs being the close relatives of modern birds.’ Liaoning may be rich in fossils that help fill gaps, but it may not be the only locality to have feathered dinosaurs. There’s a chance that fields rich in these fossils are waiting to be exploited in Australia too – but more on that later.

q Feathers are just one way in which theropods are now known to have been similar to birds. The discovery of Mei long (‘sleeping dragon’) in Liaoning in 2004 hinted that many traits we see in birds today evolved long ago. Sometime in the early Cretaceous, around 125 million years ago, this small dinosaur tucked its head under its folded arm and its legs under its body, and went to sleep in the position roosting birds adopt to prevent heat loss. While sleeping, a rain of volcanic ash from an eruption buried it, preserving a rare snapshot of prehistoric behaviour.

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Studies also show that, unlike lizards, which lay all their eggs in a single batch, dinosaurs produced two at a time. This is thought to be an intermediate step to birds, which have one egg in their pelvic canal at a time, thought to lighten their burden for flight. David Varricchio, a palaeontologist at Montana State University, is one of a number of researchers who have uncovered a wealth of clues about dinosaur brooding and reproduction. One of his papers, published in Science in 2008, shows that bones of carnivorous dinosaurs – which were fossilised atop their nests – have few of the minerals that actively egg-laying female birds accumulate in their bones. This suggests they were male, and along with the large size of clutches of eggs is evidence that the trait of paternal care is the ancestral one. ‘The interpretation of male care is built on the presence of a number of features shared by dinosaurs such as Troodon, the oviraptors and birds,’ he says. Today, in species of birds with large clutches, males typically brood them, to allow females to focus on egg production. Males have a role in offspring care in around 90 per cent of living birds. Other theropods were discovered in brooding positions on nests, and studies of fossilised eggs show similarities to birds, adds Varricchio: ‘These features include microscopic aspects of the eggshell, the porosity and the egg shape.’ Some of the most ingenious work, however, is the analysis of bones, such as Varricchio’s work on mineral composition. A common misconception about fossils is that they are pure rock, but in many cases fossils retain some original bone material. Ostrom was the first to suggest that birds evolved from agile, fleet-footed predators, such as the 3.4-metre-long Deinonychus (‘terrible claw’), which lived around 110 million years ago and weighed 70 kilograms, and its sleeker relatives, Dromaeosaurus (‘running lizard’) and Velociraptor (‘swift seizer’), which weighed

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around 15 kilograms and prowled North America around 75 million years ago. But the authors of one clever study found a way to more directly infer metabolic rate in the ancestors of birds. It has been shown that birds have unusually small genomes (the sum total of all their DNA) compared with other vertebrates, as do bats. In the 1970s, Polish researcher Henryk Szarski hypothesised that small genomes are useful precursors to flight, because they allow for a smaller nucleus and for smaller cells with a larger relative surface, equalling greater gas exchange and increased efficiency. It sounds like a small difference, but flying is one of the most energy-intensive things an animal can do, so even minor gains can confer advantage. In 2009 a study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B confirmed the relationship by showing that hummingbirds – with the highest metabolic rate of all birds – also have the smallest genomes. But how does this relate to dinosaurs? Several years earlier, researchers led by Harvard University geneticist Chris Organ came up with a clever idea for estimating dinosaur genome size. They found that, in living birds, the size of bone cells, called osteocytes, correlates well with genome size, so they applied the same technique to measure the size of these cells in the fossil bones of 31 species of dinosaur. Their results indicate that genome reduction was underway 230 to 250 million years ago in the ‘saurischian’ dinosaur ancestors of birds, which include both theropods and their longnecked sauropod cousins. In contrast, the less bird-like ‘ornithischian’ group, which included the duck-billed hadrosaurs and triceratops, did not have such small osteocytes and presumably branched off from the saurischians before the genome reduction occurred. ‘The origin of the avian genome size was in the dinosaurs,’ says Long. ‘Feathers developed in tandem with avian physiology.’ Another aspect of this avian physiology was the unusual

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breathing apparatus of birds. Unlike mammals, which breathe by contracting and expanding their lungs, birds use a bellows-like system to pump air through their lungs. CT scans of fossilised bones from the ribcage of an Argentinean dinosaur called Aerosteon riocoloradensis hints at a similar setup. Other studies have shown that theropods may have had tiny bones, called ‘uncinate processes’ in birds, which work as levers to help move the ribs and sternum efficiently during breathing. In 2005, another forensic analysis of bone controversially purported to have found the remains of soft tissue, including blood and protein, in a 68-million-year-old T. rex bone from Montana. Researchers, including John Asara of Harvard University, subsequently analysed extracted collagen and showed that the sequence of amino acids in it was a close match to chicken collagen, providing the first genetic evidence for a link with birds. In an effort to silence their critics and prove this wasn’t a one-trick wonder, the same team have now extracted soft tissue from an 80-million-year-old hadrosaur bone. It now seems that dinosaurs were even suffering from the same diseases that afflict modern birds. A team including Varricchio and Steve Salisbury at the University of Queensland believe that holes in the jawbones of many Tyrannosaurus specimens were caused by trichomonosis, a disease that is endemic in pigeons and fatal to birds of prey. Some of the most famous T. rex specimens – including the first skull from which the species was described and ‘Sue’, the most complete specimen, housed at Chicago’s Field Museum – appear to have characteristic marks of the infection in their jaws. This could have led to swelling, problems with eating, and eventually death, says a study on the find reported in September 2009 in the journal PLoS One. Up to 60 per cent of Tyrannosaurus specimens display evidence of face-biting, says Salisbury, hinting at how the infection may have spread. ‘We can see similarities with what has been

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happening to Tasmanian devils recently, where a debilitating oral cancer is being spread by animals fighting and biting each other’s faces,’ he adds. ‘It’s ironic to think that an animal as mighty as Sue probably died as a result of a parasitic infection.’ So all the evidence points to the fact that, in many ways, theropod dinosaurs were remarkably similar to birds. But it still doesn’t answer the questions of how and why these beasts became airborne. For that we need to return to China’s growing trove of feathered fossils.

q Peppered with farmland and factories, Liaoning Province in northeastern China is a day’s drive from Beijing. It has been a hub of palaeontological activity since the 1990s. The feathered fossil of Sinosauropteryx was discovered there, and it spurred a fossil-hunting gold rush the likes of which had never been seen before. As Witmer writes: [Liaoning] is renowned for the fossils that document, in often vivid detail, virtually the entire biota that lived over a period of several million years during the Early Cretaceous, about 125 million years ago. Although exquisite fossils of diverse vertebrates, invertebrates and plants have been recovered, it’s the spectacular feathered dinosaurs that have received most attention and caused much controversy.

Asia consisted of a series of isolated basins then, which favoured lakes and marshy environments. These ‘lake beds combined with some volcanic input appear to be particularly good at generating exceptional preservation [of fossils],’ says Varricchio. In addition, China can invest enormous manpower into recovering fossils. ‘Some of these localities are unquestionably very rich in fossils but … the success is clearly linked to the almost

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unlimited labour available in China,’ says Luis Chiappe, director of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. ‘It is the palaeontological parallel of the construction of the Great Wall.’ Thousands of farmers have become ‘bone diggers’, who find fossils and sell them to dealers. Xu Xing is a palaeontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, who has discovered many of the new specimens. He says that ‘though it is illegal, many farmers are involved in digging, which explains why we continuously have new things’. Based on these fossils, experts now think that birds are the direct descendants of one of two theropod groups: the dromaeosaurids, such as Velociraptor, or the smaller troodontids, such as Mei long. Another possibility is that these two groups together are the sister group of birds. All of these animals had complex, branched feathers, but a few fossils hint that feathers have their origins much deeper in the family tree. In March 2009 a paper in Nature co-authored by Xu described a 70-centimetre-long bipedal herbivore named Tianyulong confuciusi that had primitive filamentous feathers. Nothing unusual in that, except this animal was not a close relative of the theropods – it was in the ornithischian group of dinosaurs thought to have diverged from the line that led to birds 220 million years ago. It’s therefore possible, says Xu, that all groups of dinosaurs could have had simple feathers. ‘There appears to be evidence suggesting that even the filaments of pterosaurs [flying reptiles distantly related to dinosaurs] are likely to be a kind of primitive feathers,’ he adds. ‘Of course, this needs more evidence.’ Paul Sereno, veteran dinosaur hunter at Chicago’s Field Museum, isn’t so sure. He says that there’s evidence of impressions of scaly skin for large dinosaurs and for many groups other than the theropods. It’s possible that these species subsequently

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lost their feathers, or only had them as juveniles. Nobody really knows. The very simple feathers in Tianyulong are hair-like, and most experts believe that the first function of feathers was insulation. Later, feathers perhaps developed a display function, as seen in Epidexipteryx and modern birds. Others suggest that feathers may also have functioned as tactile sensors (like whiskers) and have been used to shade and insulate clutches of eggs. Some speculate that later, feathers helped swift predatory species become more streamlined, says Long. One theory holds that the sharp retractable claws of the raptors were a specialisation that allowed them to hook onto – and scale the back of – large herbivorous species. In this context, it’s easy to see how branched flight feathers could have helped give these animals an extra bit of lift to jump and glide when stalking prey. Nevertheless, says Sereno: The transition to flight was a very tough evolutionary step, far greater than our own historical move to walking on two legs. This move into the air as a powered flier was accomplished only three times [in pterosaurs, birds and then bats] in the course of vertebrates’ 350-million-year residency on land.

But it’s clear to see what the benefits were, he adds: There was a great unpopulated niche-land to exploit, waiting for a toothy animal with a backbone that was more nimble than a pterosaur. That’s why evolution took them there … but the transition was very, very difficult, and achievable only at small body size.

q

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There are two competing theories about how the transition was eventually made: ‘ground-up’ and ‘trees-down’. The debate is still the subject of controversy among palaeontologists. The ground-up idea (more widely accepted until recently) suggests that the ancestors of birds flapped their feathered forearms to increase running speed. ‘This scenario, to some extent duplicated by some living birds, would explain the origin of flight from the ground up, as these flapping and running dinosaurs became smaller and their wings became larger,’ says Chiappe. Not everyone agrees. Varricchio says: Personally I feel the [theory] is absurd, since we have no examples of ‘running flyers’ today that could represent an intermediate stage. There are more examples of flying fish than flying runners. But there are many examples of treesdown gliders – gliding frogs, marsupials, various placental mammals, snakes and lizards.

In 2003 Liaoning offered up something totally unexpected – and it lent powerful support to the trees-down school of thought. Microraptor gui was a four-winged species with modern flight feathers on both its forelimbs and its hindlimbs, in addition to a fan of feathers on its tail. Xu led a team that described the species from six specimens found in Liaoning, all around 125 million years old. The 77-centimetre-long animal probably tucked its hindlimbs up under its body during flight, to form a biplane configuration, and then glided, like a flying squirrel, between the treetops. One confusing problem has been that most of these feathered dinosaurs are significantly younger than Archaeopteryx itself, which is 150 million years old. This is because not many of the older, Jurassic deposits are as good as those of Liaoning. Though Liaoning’s species can give us clues about the transition, they

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cannot be direct ancestors of birds, as they were contemporaries of a diverse fauna of early birds, which are also found in the deposits. Another dinosaur with fully developed feathers on its limbs, and even feet, may settle this ‘temporal paradox’: Anchiornis huxleyi, described in Nature in September 2009, is a troodontid species that lived between 151 and 161 million years ago in Jianchang, China. It therefore predates Archaeopteryx. ‘Anchiornis is really amazing: it shows that four-winged dinosaurs, from different groups, lived across different time periods,’ says Xu. ‘We now have quite strong evidence supporting the idea that the first bird was a four-winged animal like Anchiornis or Microraptor, and it probably originated around 160 million years ago.’ Evidence is building that having feathered hindlimbs was the ancestral condition in a species that predated the split between dromaeosaurs, troodontids and birds. So what would settle the debates? Finding similar fossil beds to the Liaoning’s 125-million-year-old Cretaceous deposits, but in other parts of the world – and earlier eras – would help.

q Australia has been considered lacking in dinosaur fossils, but palaeontologist Tom Rich, at Museum Victoria in Melbourne, thinks we could be sitting on a goldmine. He tells of 130-million-year-old fossils found in the Strzelecki Ranges of southeastern Australia that are tantalisingly similar to Liaoning’s. These include fish, plants and insects that correspond to Chinese species. Most intriguing are six feathers from Koonwarra, Victoria. ‘[This] demonstrates that birds or feathered dinosaurs were in proximity,’ he says, and the preservation at Koonwarra records those fine details. However, getting to the fossils is a challenge. ‘The amount of digging we have done in Australia is nowhere near sufficient,’ adds Rich, who describes a similar site in China

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where 65 labourers dug solidly for four months. Heavy machinery is required in Australia, but there is little funding for such a large-scale search. ‘If we were ever to find articulated fossils with feathers attached in Australia, Koonwarra would be best, but I think it’s a long shot,’ says Scott Hocknull, dinosaur curator at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane. ‘Fossil sites are much harder to access in Australia. In China and North America, you have uplift and glacial cycles that strip off the top layers of rock. In Australia, we don’t have this [so] we need large machinery.’ When Hocknull discovered a new dinosaur in Winton, Queensland, in 2008, he couldn’t help but be struck by the remarkable resemblances of the bones to some emus living nearby: It’s quite amazing to dig up 98-million-year-old dinosaur bones and compare them to the emus wandering around on site. The emus look stupid, but are actually inquisitive and intelligent, with complex methods of communication.

Even without new discoveries, the bounty of evidence so far points to a world in which the dinosaurs did not became extinct when a comet or asteroid smashed into the planet 65 million years ago. Small, brainy dinosaurs survived the cataclysm and are all around us today, displaying plumage much as they did so long ago. ‘Remember, when you next tuck into a tasty morsel of chicken … that you are eating something that seamlessly evolved from the mighty predatory dinosaurs,’ writes Long in his book. ‘There’s just a hint of T. rex in every bite.’

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f Wings p. 12 Fossils p. 106 Searching p. 6

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Australian floods: Why were we so surprised? Germaine Greer

What’s going on in Australia is rain. British people might think that they’re rain experts. Truth is that they hardly know what rain is. The kind of cold angel sweat that wets British windscreens isn’t proper rain. For weeks now rain has been drumming in my ears, leaping off my corrugated steel roof, frothing through the rocks, spouting off the trees, and running, running, running past my house and down into the gully, into the little creek, into the bigger creek, and on to the Nerang River and out to sea at Southport. We’ve had more than 350mm in the last four days. My creek is running so high and so fast that I can’t get out and my workforce can’t get in. I can’t even go for a walk under the dripping trees, because I’ll come back festooned with leeches. In these conditions you can end up with a leech in your eye, and there’s no one here to help get it out. The rain comes in pulses. When the noise abates, momentarily, I can see Mount Hobwee through veils of wet mist, and then I hear the advancing roar of the next pulse, and everything shuts down again. Behind my house a white cataract is charging down the gully through the rocks. When I’m in bed I can feel the thudding of its raw power through my bones.

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Germaine Greer

So, yeah, as Australians say, the problem is rain. The ground is swollen with months of it. The new downpours have nowhere to go but sideways, across the vast floodplains of this ancient continent. We all learned the poem at school, about how ours is ‘a sunburnt country … of droughts and flooding rains’. Groggy TV presenters who have been on extended shifts, talking floods for endless hours, will repeat the mantra, so hard is it wired into the heads of Australian kids. And yet we still don’t get it. After 10 years of drought, we are having the inevitable flooding rains. The pattern is repeated regularly and yet Australians are still taken by surprise. The meteorologists will tell you that the current deluge is a product of La Niña. At fairly regular intervals, atmospheric pressure on the western side of the Pacific falls; the trade winds blow from the cooler east side towards the trough, pushing warm surface water westwards towards the bordering land masses. As the water-laden air is driven over the land it cools and drops its load. In June last year the Bureau of Meteorology issued a warning that La Niña was about ‘to dump buckets’ on Australia. In 1989–90 La Niña brought flooding to New South Wales and Victoria, in 1998 to New South Wales and Queensland. Dr Andrew Watkins, manager of the bureau’s climate prediction services, told the assembled media: ‘Computer model forecasts show a significant likelihood of a La Niña in 2010.’ In Brisbane the benchmark was the flood of 1974; most Queenslanders are unaware that the worst flood in Brisbane’s history happened in 1893. Six months ago the meteorologists thought it was worthwhile to warn people to ‘get ready for a wet, late winter and a soaked spring and summer’. So what did the people do? Nothing. They said, ‘She’ll be right, mate.’ She wasn’t. It takes La Niña to bring rain to the inland, in such quantities that it can hardly be managed. Manage it Australians must. The Wivenhoe Dam on the Brisbane River was built to protect the city of Brisbane from another flood like the one of 1974. For

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years it has been at 10 per cent of capacity, so when it filled this year nobody wanted to let any of the precious water out. It eventually became clear that the dam had filled to 190 per cent of its capacity, and the authorities realised with sinking hearts not only that the floodgates would have to be opened, but that the opening would coincide with a king tide in Moreton Bay. The question nobody has been heard to ask is whether or not the level of water in the dam should have been reduced gradually, beginning weeks earlier. The mayor of Brisbane, aware that a disaster was about to occur on his watch, made a hysterical attack on the opponents of dam building, but what the succeeding events proved is that dams are no substitute for a coherent water strategy. The phenomenon is anything but momentary; the not-soexceptional rainfall will continue, probably until the end of March. Professor Neville Nicholls, president of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, believes that ‘the Queensland floods are caused by what is one of the strongest (if not the strongest) La Niña events since our records began in the late 19th century’. He was asked if the intensification was a consequence of global warming, and declined to comment. Other people have been rather too quick to claim the extreme weather as a direct consequence of global warming. (It will surprise many readers of the Guardian to learn that in Australia there is still a bad-tempered debate about whether global warming is happening or not.) One of the penalties of living on the east coast, as most Australians do, is that all the rain that falls on the mountains known as the Great Dividing Range heads your way. Up here, at the top of the watershed, I have only to fear a landslide, which will happen if slopes now bulging with water actually burst. At sea level, it’s anybody’s guess. Meteorologists and hydrologists try to predict peak levels and peak times, and have to revise their estimates up and down like yo-yos.

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Germaine Greer

The world is aware of what has been happening in Australia because so much of Queensland’s capital city, Brisbane, the ‘most livable city in Australia’, is now submerged in dirty brown water. Smaller towns in Australia have been flooded for months; some have been flooded five times since the beginning of December. What the rest of the world must be asking is why Australians don’t take steps to minimise the destruction. In the southern United States you could take your Chevy to the levee; Australians rarely build them. An 8-metre levee has kept the town of Grafton dry, though the Clarence river is in massive spate, but Yamba, further downstream, has no levee and is under water. Goondiwindi has an 11-metre levee to protect it from the Macintyre River, but hydrologists have predicted a peak of 10.85 metres – far too close for comfort. Evacuations have begun. When I drove south to see my family for Christmas, I had to drive around the floods in the Riverina; on the way back I had to avoid the flooded Richmond River round Kyogle. The Darling Downs area was inundated in December and has been inundated again; Dalby, Chinchilla, Warwick and Condamine had already started the clean-up, and have had to evacuate low-lying areas for the second time. The second flood in Chinchilla was worse than the December flood; residents have now been told to boil their water because the piped water is thought to have been contaminated by E. coli. The Burnett River has flooded Bundaberg again and the Mary River Maryborough. Rockhampton has been under water for a month. There is no guarantee that the end is in sight. In the case of Toowoomba, Grantham and Murphy’s Creek, there was nothing to be done. The Lockyer Valley suffered a flash flood, in which a sudden deluge generated an 8-metre wave of water that ripped through the towns, drowning people in their cars, popping houses off their stumps, and whirling them downstream. The resulting TV footage has been seen by Australians hundreds of times. It is the stuff of nightmares, with cars and

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buses bouncing end over end down streets full of people clutching at anything they can find to avoid being swept away. The army is now involved in searching for the bodies of the 61 people still missing; there is no more talk of rescue. The total dead to date is 26. In Brisbane a 24-year-old man went to check on his father and got swept into a storm drain. The rest of the world might well be scratching its head. Though the rise of the Brisbane River had been predicted for many days, owners left their boats on the river, some of them moored to pontoons, which were themselves ripped from their moorings. Literally hundreds of pontoons went careering down the river, crashing into unmanned powerboats that were already cannoning into each other. A long section of the riverside walkway broke away and became a waterborne missile. A floating restaurant was sucked under a bridge. Some idiots went racing around in the brown surge on jetskis, unmindful of the half-submerged debris that could have smashed them and their jetskis to smithereens. People who insisted on staying in their apartments appear not to have understood that the electricity company would turn off the current, that their refrigerators would not be working, that they couldn’t get to a supermarket and that the supermarkets that weren’t flooded had no food left. They are the only people who don’t know, unless they have a battery-powered radio, what’s going on. It could be weeks before the water drains from Brisbane streets, so even these die-hards may have to ask for help from the emergency services. The official view is that Australians in flood areas are being wonderful. They are pulling together, helping each other, staying cheerful, not complaining. When given the opportunity they make inspiring statements, that they’ll rebuild their communities, stronger and better than ever. That they are Queenslanders, who don’t give up. (And so forth.) What nobody is talking about yet, is whether the flood risk can be reduced.

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Germaine Greer

The colour of the water reveals a terrible truth. What is being washed downstream is topsoil. The water moves so rapidly because so much of the land has been cleared. Any wooded land will be, like mine, high in the catchment. As long ago as 1923, Sydney Skertchly, an Englishman who had been working for the Queensland government as a geologist before he retired to what is now the Gold Coast suburb of Molendinar, pointed out that rain that fell in the upper part of the Nerang River catchment that used to take five days to reach him on the coastal plain at Molendinar, now reached him in five hours. When the settlers first arrived on the coast of northern New South Wales and southern Queensland, the rivers were navigable. As the ‘scrubs’ (the settlers’ way of referring to rainforest) were ripped out, the seasonal rains carried the topsoil into the rivers, which silted up and then began to flood. The tide of brown water that is now polluting the sea off eastern Australia is bound to damage already damaged marine ecosystems. The world needs Australia to restore its mangroves, which is where the nutrients carried in the brown water would have been recycled. As well as sediment, the brown water carries nutrients and pesticides from agricultural run-off, together with whatever nasties have been washed out of flooded coalmines. The salinity of the sea-water could drop to 10 parts per 1000 or even less and remain like that for weeks. After the Fitzroy River flooded Rockhampton in 1991, all the corals and sea grasses round the Keppel Islands died. The area had not yet recovered when the brown tide returned at the beginning of January, and keeps coming. The fresh water now entering the seas off Australia is expected to drift northwards to the Great Barrier Reef, which is already struggling with rising sea temperatures. In ecological terms, worse, perhaps very much worse, is on the way. Australia owes it to the rest of the world to get a handle on its regular floods. Or she won’t be right, mate.

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The creatures of the rainforest are used to rain. After gorging on the treefrogs that are mating in a rainpool by the house, a night tiger snake has come up to sleep the day away on my verandah. A rufous fly-catcher is hunting for his breakfast under the verandah roof because there are no insects out in the rain. The regent bowerbird is enjoying his morning shower 50 metres up in the top of the quandong, meticulously grooming each gleaming feather.

f Predictions p. 208 Rivers p. 93

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No escaping the science Clive Hamilton

One of the most striking features of the global warming debate has been how, with each advance in climate science, the news keeps getting worse. Although temporarily slowed by the effects of the 2008 global financial crisis, the world’s greenhouse gas emissions have been growing much faster than predicted in the 1990s. In addition, since 2005 a number of scientific papers have described the likelihood of the climate system passing significant ‘tipping points’ beyond which the warming process is reinforced by positive feedback mechanisms – small perturbations that cause large changes. This new understanding has upset the comforting idea of a ‘dose–response’ relationship between the amount of greenhouse gases we put into the atmosphere and the amount of global warming that follows. That idea has allowed us to believe that, although we may be slow to respond, once we decide to act we will be able to rescue the situation. In truth, it is likely that in the next decade or so, beginning with the melting of the Arctic’s summer sea-ice, the Earth’s climate will shift onto a new trajectory driven by ‘natural’ processes that will take millenniums to work themselves out. The paleoclimate record shows the Earth’s climate often changing abruptly, flipping from one state to another, sometimes

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within a few years. It now seems almost certain that, if it has not occurred already, within the next several years enough warming will be locked into the system to set in train feedback processes that will overwhelm any attempts we make to cut back on our carbon emissions. We will be powerless to stop the jump to a new climate on Earth, one much less sympathetic to life. The kind of climate that has allowed civilisation to flourish will be gone and humans will enter a long struggle just to survive. It is hard to accept that human beings could so change the composition of Earth’s atmosphere that civilisation, and even the existence of the species, is jeopardised. Yet that is what some climate scientists now believe. Scientists are naturally reticent; except for a few mavericks, they stick to what they know with a high degree of certainty, which in most circumstances is appropriate. Yet after a massive research effort over the last 20 years scientists are beginning to express the fear that now haunts them – that the consequences of global warming are much worse than we thought and the world will almost certainly not act in time to stop it. These fears were cemented by the agreement reached at Copenhagen in December 2009 which locked the world into only modest abatement action for the foreseeable future. In 2007 James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the world’s foremost climate experts, wrote of the traditional caution of scientists that has led them to understate the risks of a sea-level rise of several metres due to the possible collapse of the West Antarctic and Greenland icesheets. He argued that scientists are more worried about being accused of ‘crying wolf ‘ than they are of being accused of ‘fiddling while Rome burns’. There are, of course, institutional and cultural barriers that interfere with the process of communicating science to political decision-makers. Scientific journals are more likely to publish papers if they are cautious and filled with caveats. And, for all its virtues, the consensus process of the

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Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the basis for the official response to global warming, naturally favours conservatism and understatement of the dangers. Hansen wrote: There is enough information now, in my opinion, to make it a near certainty that business-as-usual climate forcing scenarios would lead to a disastrous multi-metre sea level rise on the century time scale.

The accelerating rate of melting of the Arctic sea-ice has shocked the scientists studying it, with many believing that summer ice will disappear entirely within the next decade or two. Some expect it to be gone even sooner. Mark Serreze, director of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, has declared that ‘Arctic ice is in its death spiral.’ The dark water surface that will replace the reflective white one in summer will absorb more solar radiation, setting off a positive feedback process of further warming. This is expected to initiate a cascade of effects as the patch of warmth over the Arctic spreads in all directions, warming the surrounding oceans, melting the Siberian permafrost and destabilising the Greenland icesheet. In December 2007, after a summer that saw a dramatic decline in Arctic sea-ice, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: ‘The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming. Now, as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines.’ Another resorted to a biblical metaphor: ‘Climate scientists have begun to feel like a bunch of Noahs.’ The world’s top climate scientists are now ringing the alarm bell at a deafening volume because the time to act has virtually passed, yet it is as if the frequency of the chime is beyond the threshold of human hearing. While the scientists are becoming more desperate, the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases have been going through the roof. In the 1970s and 1980s global

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emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fossil fuels increased at 2 per cent each year. In the 1990s they fell to 1 per cent. Since the year 2000, the growth rate of the world’s CO2 emissions has almost trebled, to 3 per cent a year. At that rate annual emissions will double every 25 years. While rates of growth in rich countries have fallen below 1 per cent, they have expanded enormously in developing countries, led by China, where fossil fuel emissions grew by 11–12 per cent annually in the first decade of this century. By 2005 China accounted for 18 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions; by 2030 it is expected to be responsible for 33 per cent. The Chinese government takes climate change seriously – much more so than the United States did under the Bush Administration – and has implemented a number of policies designed to cut the emissions intensity of electricity and transport, but the sheer expansion of the economy is swamping all attempts at constraining the growth of carbon pollution. The hope in the 1990s that greater energy efficiency and a gradual shift to low-carbon sources of energy in the West could head off global warming has been battered by the extraordinary growth of China’s economy, compounded by that of India, Brazil and a couple of other large developing economies. The energy that powers this growth has come predominantly from burning coal. In the years after 2000, coal consumption by developing countries rose by 10 per cent annually. Rather than decarbonising, the world is carbonising at an unprecedented rate, and it is doing so at precisely the time we know we have to stop it. The recession that arrived in late 2008 slowed, and in some countries reversed, growth in annual carbon emissions, but the volume of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continued to rise, just as reducing the flow rate of tap water does not stop the bath filling up. Even if annual emissions stopped dead, the fact that most of our past carbon emissions remain in the atmosphere for

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a long time would mean that the elevated global temperature would persist for many centuries. There is every reason to expect that, without policy intervention, emissions will revert to pre-recession rates for some decades. As the pace of China’s economic expansion inevitably slows over the next two decades or so, growth in other large developing countries is likely to accelerate. Over the last two centuries some 75 per cent of increased greenhouse gas emissions have been put into the atmosphere by rich countries; over the next century more than 90 per cent of the growth in global emissions is expected to occur in developing countries. It is little wonder that, according to one newspaper survey, more than half of climate scientists now believe that cutting emissions will no longer be enough to avoid the worst and we will be forced to pursue the radical and dangerous route of engineering the global climate.

Worse than the worst case The headline of the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report in 2001 was that average global surface temperatures are projected to increase by anywhere between 1.4 and 5.8ºC above pre-industrial levels over the period 1990 to 2100. Climate ‘sceptics’ attacked those who emphasised the upper limit as alarmist and scoffed at the possibility of 6ºC of warming, suggesting that the width of the range was a measure of the lack of confidence of the IPCC in the science. In truth, most of the variability in the range was due not to uncertainties about how much warming is associated with a given concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but to the difficulty of forecasting the future path of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. The models of the economists, rather than those of the scientists, were to blame. In the 1990s the IPCC developed a number of scenarios to reflect future influences on emissions and associated warming. Of the half-dozen or so main IPCC scenarios, the ‘worst-case

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scenario’ is known as A1FI. This scenario, the one that has given the highest estimates of warming in the IPCC reports, assumed strong rates of global economic growth with continued high dependency on fossil fuel-based forms of energy production over the next decades. It is worth noting here that climate deniers and conservatives have frequently accused the IPCC of exaggeration and ridiculed environmentalists for fear-mongering when they refer to the possibility of warming reaching the upper boundaries of the IPCC projections. Bjorn Lomborg, whose book The Skeptical Environmentalist made him the darling of right-wing thinktanks and newspaper columnists, declared in 2001 that the A1FI scenario was ‘patently implausible’ and that carbon emissions are much more likely to follow the lowest paths suggested by the IPCC. On this basis, he extended the argument of his book to conclude that: ‘global warming is not an ever-worsening problem. In fact, under any reasonable scenario of technological change and without policy intervention, carbon emissions will not reach the levels of A1FI and they will decline towards the end of this century …’ Lomborg made this confident declaration just at the time when it was becoming apparent that growth in global emissions had risen so high that the world had shifted onto a path that is worse than the worst-case scenario imagined by the IPCC. In its worst case the IPCC anticipated growth in CO2 emissions of 2.5 per cent per annum through to 2030, yet we have seen that from around 2000 global emissions began growing at 3 per cent a year. This worse-than-the-worst-case scenario should now be regarded as the most likely one in the absence of determined intervention. It is not often in the history of public debate that a commentator has been proven as emphatically wrong as Lomborg has been. What are we facing under such a scenario? The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, published in 2007, narrowed the likely

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range of warming to 2.4 to 4.6ºC above pre-industrial levels by 2100 if we do nothing. The upper limit of 4.6ºC became the most likely outcome for the A1FI scenario. Climate scientists believe that the temperature threshold that would bring about the melting of the Greenland icesheet is between 1ºC and 3ºC: in other words, well below the 4.6ºC warming level expected under A1FI. As I will argue next, the numbers show that even with urgent and sustained global action it seems unlikely that we will be able to keep the Earth’s temperature from rising by anything less than 3ºC. Melting of the Greenland icesheet would eventually result in the world’s oceans rising by around 7 metres, dramatically redrawing the geography of the Earth.

Scientific urgency versus political sluggishness I am trying to keep the use of numbers and abbreviations to a minimum, but to get a true sense of what we are up against a few more figures are needed. Note here too that carbon dioxide is only the most prominent greenhouse gas. In order to analyse the effects of all greenhouse gases, the others – methane, nitrous oxide and a number of ‘trace gases’ – are converted into their ‘global warming potential’ and measured in carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2-e). When I refer to ‘greenhouse gases’ I mean all of them, not just carbon dioxide. It is widely accepted in international negotiations that if global average temperatures increase by 2ºC above the preindustrial average, we will pass into the danger zone. Warming of 2ºC is the most likely outcome if greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere are allowed to increase to 450 ppm (parts per million), as long as we exclude the effects of positive feedbacks. Resolved to decide what is meant by ‘dangerous’ warming in the Framework Convention, the European Union adopted 2ºC as the target level below which warming must be kept. The chances of stopping warming at 2ºC above pre-indus-

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trial levels are virtually zero because the chances of keeping concentrations below 450 ppm are virtually zero. In fact, in 2007 the concentration of greenhouse gases reached 463 ppm, although when the warming effect is adjusted to account for the cooling effect of aerosols the figure falls to 396 ppm. Only air pollution is protecting us. The Earth’s temperature is already 0.8ºC above its long-term average, and existing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere mean that another 0.7ºC of heating is in the pipeline and unavoidable, even if emissions fell to zero tomorrow. Most leading climate scientists now believe that 2ºC of warming would pose a substantial risk both because of its direct impacts on climatically sensitive Earth systems and because of the potential to trigger irreversible changes in those systems. The latter include the disappearance of Arctic summer sea-ice and melting of much of the Greenland and West Antarctic icesheets. James Hansen has declared the goal of keeping warming at 2ºC ‘a recipe for global disaster’. He believes the safe level of CO2 in the atmosphere is no more than 350 ppm. The current level of CO2 is 385 ppm, rising at around 2 ppm each year, so we have already overshot our target and must somehow draw down large volumes of CO2 from the atmosphere. In the history of life on Earth there have been ice-free eras – a planet with no glaciers and no polar ice caps. In these times sea levels have been some 70 metres higher than they are today. Paleoclimate studies of sediments and ice core records indicate that the Antarctic icesheet started to form once atmospheric CO2 levels fell below about 500 ppm, and the Greenland and West Antarctic icesheets formed when levels fell below about 400 ppm. Once melting commences there is little humans can do to arrest it, except perhaps by simulating volcanic eruptions. It is on this basis that Hansen and his fellow researchers conclude that ‘if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed … CO2 will need to be reduced from its

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current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm’. Who could have predicted that at the beginning of the 21st century humanity would have to ask itself whether it can preserve a planet fit for civilisation? Despite these serious doubts about the semi-official target, is aiming to limit warming to even 2ºC a feasible goal? What do we have to do to stop emissions pushing temperatures above this level? Just before the Bali Climate Change Conference at the end of 2008, climate scientists released a new assessment arguing that, in order to have a good chance of avoiding the 2ºC threshold, rich countries must by 2020 reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 25–40 per cent below 1990 levels. The 25 per cent target quickly became entrenched internationally as the benchmark against which the commitment of rich countries is judged. The fact that aiming for 25 per cent instead of 40 per cent means developing countries will have to do a lot more was conveniently passed over. We have seen that rather than declining or even growing more slowly, global emissions have in fact been accelerating over the last decade. To have any hope of avoiding catastrophes, emissions must peak within the next few years, and certainly no later than 2020, then begin a rapid decline to the point where all energy generation and industrial processes are completely carbon free. Hansen has put it bluntly: Decision-makers do not appreciate the gravity of the situation … Continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions, for just another decade, practically eliminates the possibility of near-term return of atmospheric composition beneath the tipping level for catastrophic effects.

Meeting in March 2009, the world’s leading climate scientists reached a similar conclusion: ‘immediate and dramatic emission

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reductions of all greenhouse gases are needed if the 2ºC guardrail is to be respected’. The urgent question we must now ask ourselves is whether the global community is capable of cutting emissions at the speed required to avoid the Earth passing a point of no return beyond which the future will be out of our hands. It is this irreversibility that makes global warming not simply unique among environmental problems, but unique among all the problems humanity has faced. Beyond a certain point it will not be possible to change our behaviour to control climate change, no matter how resolved we are to do so. We moderns have become accustomed to the idea that we can modify our environment to suit our needs and have acted accordingly for some 300 years. We are now discovering that our intoxicating belief that we can conquer all has come up against a greater force, the Earth itself. The prospect of runaway climate change challenges our technological hubris, our Enlightenment faith in reason and the whole modernist project. The Earth may soon demonstrate that, ultimately, it cannot be tamed and that the human urge to master nature has only roused a slumbering beast.

f Extinction p. 62 Civilisation p. 192 Debate p. 183

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How aqua regia saved Nobel Prize medals from the Nazis Captain Skellett

It was a brisk April morning in 1940, and George was in a fix. In his hands were two Nobel Prizes illegally smuggled from Germany, while outside the lab the Nazis were swarming the streets of Copenhagen. Denmark was occupied by the Germans, and it was only a matter of time before they entered the Institute of Theoretical Physics and searched the building. The medals belonged to Max von Laue and James Franck, Germans who had won Nobel Prizes in Physics some years ago. Their names were engraved on the medals, and removing gold from Germany was a serious offence, carrying a punishment not to be sneezed at. George was certainly not sneezing, but his palms were sweating as if he had a fever and his heart pounded like a drum. It might be mere hours before the Nazis searched the lab and found the medals, and then his neck would be on the chopping block along with the others. What to do? Hide them in a hollowed out book as children hide sweets? No, there was no guarantee of safety – the books could be sent away or burned for all he knew. Bury them? There simply wasn’t time, and a freshly dug grave would only attract attention. No, the medals had to be changed, made unrecognis-

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How aqua regia saved Nobel Prize medals

able, hidden in plain sight … Somehow. Think, George, think. To every problem there must be a solution. Keep at it until a solution appears. A solution! Of course! The medals should be hidden in solution! They could wait out the war in a nondescript bottle sitting on a shelf. If the bottle was thrown away, at least there would be no tell-tale engravings to point fingers. George looked around the lab for the ingredients of a potent cocktail. Only one thing would dissolve the gold medals. Aqua regia, a mix of three parts hydrochloric acid to one part nitric acid. Alone neither of these acids could change gold; very few things could. Gold was considered such a rare and beautiful metal for exactly that reason. It would not rust like iron or turn green like copper. Even strong, concentrated acids could not burn a hole in gold. Unless of course that acid was aqua regia, royal water. In a large flask George combined the two acids quickly, his hands now dry and his mind focused. The resulting mixture was colourless for an instant before turning faintly peach and then bright orange. With one held breath he dropped in the two gold medals. Chemistry had always attracted George de Hevesy, ever since he had first worked on radioactive isotopes 30 years ago. His work had uncovered mysteries of biology, such as which part of a growing plant would capture poisonous lead and protect the rest of the plant (the roots). He was still a mover and shaker in the field, which was growing rapidly and had even entered the realm of human experimentation. If a man was injected with a radioactive isotope, where did it go, how long did it stay there and how was it excreted? He was, in certain circles, quite famous. Perhaps in the near future he would be holding a Nobel Prize of his own. But for now, these two prizes were all he had, and they were getting smaller. Aqua regia succeeded where other acids failed

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because of the way its components worked together. Nitric acid had the power to turn small amounts of gold from a solid into a solution. On its own it wouldn’t make any difference at all. Only a tiny amount of gold would dissolve at a time: the gold in equilibrium between the solid and soluble forms. Hydrochloric acid, on the other hand, could supply its chloride atoms to convert gold to chloroaurate. But there was a problem. The reaction wouldn’t start because it couldn’t get a grip on the gold to start with. In aqua regia, the gold was put into solution by the nitric acid, and then converted to chloroaurate by hydrochloric acid. Together they pushed the equilibrium towards products, allowing the nitric acid to pull more and more gold into solution, where it was quickly changed into another form. Once the medals had disappeared, George sealed the flask and put it high up on a shelf. There it would stay until the war was over. Perhaps in brighter years he would return, extract the gold from the solution and return it to the Nobel Foundation, where the medals could be recoined. He had barely turned away when the main entrance doors burst open. The Nazis had arrived. This fiction is based on a true story. George de Hevesy is credited with dissolving two Nobel Prize medals in aqua regia and storing them during World War II, where they remained unnoticed despite careful searching by the Nazis. The gold was later recovered, recoined and re-presented to the two original owners. George de Hevesy won the 1943 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on radioactive isotopes.

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f Fiction p. 1 Close shaves p. 111 Physics p. 180

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Extremes of sound Bryan Gaensler

Our lives are never silent. I am typing these words in a seemingly quiet room, but if I pause a moment to listen, I can hear the ticking of a clock, the rumble of traffic on a nearby road, the hum of an air-conditioner next door, and some snatches of distant conversation from passers-by. Throughout a normal day, I will speak to my friends and family, listen to music, and grumble at an aeroplane flying too low over my house: sound is both a constant presence and a vital component of our lives. All these sounds are actually minuscule oscillating variations in air pressure, which travel outwards from their source at a third of a kilometre per second (‘the speed of sound’). To hear the sounds produced by pressure waves, we rely on microscopic hair-like structures inside our ears. When pressure fluctuations pass into our ear, they tilt these hairs back and forth. This tilting generates electrical signals, which are then carried to our brain and interpreted as sound. This incredible system is so finely tuned that even when the air pressure changes by 1 part in 10 billion, we can still hear the corresponding noises. Considering how full of sound the world is, it might be tempting to think that the rest of the universe could never compete.

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After all, sound is a pressure wave that needs air in which to travel, so the vacuum of space must be completely quiet, right? Indeed, one of the classic moments in cinema is in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, when astronaut Dave Bowman returns to his spaceship so that he can shut down the mad computer, HAL. When Dave first enters the airlock, it is exposed to the vacuum of space. As Dave frantically tries to close the hatch, there is about 15 seconds of film for which the soundtrack is utterly, spine-tinglingly, silent. Only after he shuts the door and begins to fill the room with air does sound return. The director, Stanley Kubrick, has often been praised for getting the physics right in 2001, in contrast to the explosions and laser fire that accompany the space battles in Star Wars, Star Trek and many other films. However, it turns out Kubrick did not get it right after all, because there are sounds in space. Space might be more rarefied than anything we can produce in a laboratory here on Earth, but it is certainly not empty. In a typical part of the Milky Way, far from any stars, planets or nebulae, every cubic metre of space contains about a million atoms. This is more than 10 million trillion times fewer atoms than in a cubic metre of air at sea level, but it is still not a vacuum. Correspondingly, the pressure of the gas in space is extremely low. But because the pressure is not zero, the movements of stars, planets and other celestial bodies through the cosmos will produce upwards or downwards variations in this pressure. And these pressure fluctuations will then travel through space as sound waves. The noises that fill the universe are certainly not sounds we’re familiar with, and are at frequencies far, far below anything that humans are capable of hearing. But they are sounds all the same, no different or more exotic than other sounds we are unable to hear unaided, such as the ultrasonic screeches of bats or the deep

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rumblings of whale song. So what sorts of noises fill the universe? Sounds far beyond anything our fragile ears can ever experience.

The ultimate sonic boom A supernova is the catastrophic explosion with which a massive star ends its life. Supernovae are among the brightest events in the universe. Unsurprisingly, this intense light is also accompanied by a deafening boom. When a supernova occurs, the outer layers of the star are blasted into space at enormous speeds. This results in a beautiful expanding bubble, known as a ‘supernova remnant’, which can persist for many thousands of years before gradually fading from view. A supernova remnant might appear fragile and delicate, but it represents a deafening wall of sound. To understand this, we first need to consider how sound moves. As I mentioned above, the speed of sound in the air around you is about a third of a kilometre per second. If you are standing a third of a kilometre away across an open field and I call out to you, there will be a delay of a second between when I speak and when you hear me: no surprises there. However, there is another important implication of the speed of sound. Suppose you are in an underground subway station, waiting for a train. Usually you can tell when the train will be coming, perhaps a minute before you can see or hear it, because you can feel a rush of air coming out of the tunnel and onto the platform, pushed out by the train coming up behind it. But why does this happen? Why doesn’t the air just pile up in front of the train, like snow in a plough or dirt in a shovel? Shouldn’t a train travelling through a long tunnel find the going increasingly harder as it sweeps up more and more air, until it grinds to a halt? Of course none of this happens. Before the train

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enters the tunnel, the tunnel is full of air. But as the train begins to enter, the air in the first part of the tunnel simply moves out of the way. All this occurs because of sound waves. When the train first pushes into the tunnel, it indeed piles up air against it, just like a snow plough. This air now has a slightly higher pressure than normal, but it can immediately transmit this pressure variation deeper into the tunnel at the speed of sound. This keeps happening as the train keeps moving: the front face of the train tries to sweep up the air ahead of it, but the air responds sufficiently quickly that it can keep moving ahead and out of the way. What essentially occurs is that any air ahead of the train receives advance warning that the train is coming, and shifts further down the tunnel before the train can hit it. The net result is that a gust of air is driven down the tunnel ahead of the train, which you can feel as a breeze on your face while standing on the platform. But what happens if a train was to travel faster than the speed of sound, a third of a kilometre per second, or around 1200 kilometres per hour? While no trains travel at this speed, aeroplanes have been doing so for more than 60 years. And as we know, when a plane breaks the sound barrier, it results in a ‘sonic boom’. What now happens is that the air in front of the plane receives no advance warning that the plane is coming, because sound waves can’t move away fast enough from the plane’s current position to get to the next given parcel of air before the plane does. Instead of a gentle rise in pressure, like the breeze being blown down a tunnel by an approaching train, there is an almost instant huge pressure jump, as completely undisturbed air in front of the plane suddenly finds itself squeezed against the plane’s leading edge. Since sound is a variation in pressure, and since the larger the pressure change, the louder the sound, this results in a sharp,

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thunderous crash. Indeed, thunder itself is a naturally occurring sonic boom, produced when a bolt of lightning abruptly heats air to very high temperatures, causing it to expand at enormous, supersonic, speeds. Similar processes occur in space, the only difference being that the speed of sound is very different. The speed of sound in a gas depends primarily on its temperature. While space itself is very cold, interstellar gas is generally quite hot, with a typical temperature of around 10Â€000ºC. The corresponding sound speed in this gas is about 10 kilometres per second, or 36Â€000 kilometres per hour, about 30 times faster than the speed of sound in the Earth’s atmosphere. Some objects drift gently through the galaxy at speeds well below this. Just as for a train in a tunnel, any interstellar gas in their path simply shifts out of their way before they arrive. However, many objects move far faster than the interstellar sound speed. Just as for a supersonic aircraft, this results in a deafening sonic boom. And the granddaddy of all sonic booms is that produced by a supernova. The initial speed at which debris from a supernova explosion is driven outwards into space can be as fast as 100 million kilometres per hour (which is 10 per cent of the speed of light!). This is almost 3000 times faster than the speed of sound in space, and the pressure of interstellar gas correspondingly jumps up by an enormous factor when the supernova explosion slams into it. How loud a boom does this make? To answer this question, we need to first agree on how the loudness of sounds is measured. Loudness is a subjective phenomenon: what is a comfortable volume for one person might be way too loud for another, depending both on the quality of their hearing and their neurological perception of audio signals. So instead of talking directly about how loud a particular sound is, we need to step back slightly, and instead consider the ‘sound pressure’ that a sound produces:

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that is, the strength of the air pressure fluctuations produced by the corresponding sound waves as they travel. A particular noise will have a specific sound pressure level, regardless of whether any individual person perceives that noise as loud or quiet. We normally measure sound pressure levels in ‘decibels’. Zero decibels is defined as a pressure fluctuation of 0.00000002 per cent of normal air pressure, corresponding to the faintest sound a normal person can hear. Every factor of 10 in air pressure larger than this corresponds to an increase of 20 decibels. For example, when you hear your own voice in a normal conversation, the pressure fluctuations that your ear picks up are at levels around 0.000002 per cent of air pressure. This is a hundred times larger variation in pressure than for zero decibels, so implies a volume of 40 decibels. The very loudest noises we might experience in everyday life, such as jack-hammers, rock concerts and jet engines, produce sound pressures of more than 100 decibels. And calculations suggest that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki reached around 250 decibels. With this understanding in hand, we can use decibels to describe how loud a sound is in interstellar space, similarly adopting zero decibels to represent a pressure that deviates by 0.00000002 per cent from the norm. The sonic boom from a nearby supernova produces a sudden increase in pressure of about 1Â€000Â€000Â€000 per cent, which corresponds to more than 330 decibels! If you could somehow float in space with your ears exposed as a supernova overran you, it’s doubtful that you would hear anything at all. Even though the jump in pressure would be enormous, the overall pressure scale would be completely out of step with what those tiny hairs in your ear are capable of responding to. Your subjective experience would be that the supernova would be silent. But this would be a biased conclusion, based on the limits of our own perception. Have pity on some hypothetical

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alien species that lives between the stars, its ears attuned to the normal sounds of orbiting stars and drifting nebulae. To such a creature, a supernova would be utterly deafening, the loudest thing it or anything else could ever experience.

Hitting that bass note A supernova is unbelievably loud but, like a thunderclap, it produces a single abrupt bang. However, the sounds of the cosmos are not just made up of individual crashes and cracks; there are also sustained notes and tones. The difference between a high note and a low note comes back to the idea that a sound wave is a rapid oscillation of air pressure above and below the average. When listening to an orchestra perform a concert, all the sound waves travel at the same speed, and arrive at your ears in synch. However, there is a wide range in the rate of oscillation in pressure produced by different instruments. The deep notes of a double bass produce sound waves that vary back and forth in pressure only 50 times per second, while for a piccolo, a typical note will generate sound waves that oscillate more than 1000 times every second. The number of pressure oscillations per second is known as the ‘frequency’ of the sound wave, and is a direct measurement of the pitch of a musical note. Unlike loudness, which has a somewhat subjective nature, pitch has a direct mathematical foundation: what you will perceive as two notes an octave apart will differ in frequency by exactly a factor of two. We can thus describe the pitch of sounds throughout the universe in a very clear and well-defined manner. These sound waves might travel at very different speeds from those on Earth, and they might involve completely different scales of pressure level variations, but their rates of oscillations are something we can estimate from our astronomical measurements, and then put on a musical scale.

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Astronomers’ calculations suggest that the pitch of the universe is very much a throaty bass or baritone rather than a soprano – most processes throughout the cosmos produce sounds that have much slower pressure oscillations, and hence much deeper notes, than what we are used to hearing. The deepest note yet identified belongs to a galaxy cluster, a conglomeration of several hundred galaxies and hot gas. The particular cluster in question, Abell 426, is often nicknamed the ‘Perseus Cluster’ because of its location in that constellation. Abell 426 is about 250 million light years away. So at this great distance, how can we possibly know that it is putting out sounds, and how do we determine what note it is singing? You might imagine that astronomers have built ultra-sensitive microphones, perhaps orbiting the Earth, which are capable of picking up the sounds from this cluster. We wish! At the speed of sound in interstellar or intergalactic space, the sound waves from Abell 426 would take more than 100 billion years to reach us, much longer than the age of the universe. So we cannot directly hear Abell 426. Instead, the approach that we must take might be considered analogous to that of a person with hearing loss living upstairs, while downstairs lives someone else who plays very loud music. The person on the top floor is unable to hear the music directly, but they can still tell that it is being played, because the salt and pepper shakers on their kitchen table vibrate in sync with the beat. Effectively, the person upstairs sees the sound waves, rather than hears them. In the same way, while we can never directly hear Abell 426’s tune, we can see the pressure waves that it creates. For AbellÂ€426, an additional challenge is that the actual vibrations happen far too slowly for us to watch them move back and forth. So to take the above analogy further, we don’t get to see the salt and pepper shakers wobble in real time, but instead are reduced to taking a

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single photograph of the kitchen table. With only a snapshot to go by, it would be challenging to realise that music was being played downstairs, let alone be able to state with any confidence what note was playing or how loud it was. But in the case of Abell 426, we have a crucial advantage: the gas that permeates the cluster (and in which individual galaxies are embedded) is incredibly hot, with a temperature in excess of 30 millionºC. At this extreme level, this gas becomes incandescent, and radiates extremely energetic X-ray radiation. In 2002, British astronomer Andy Fabian used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to make a detailed image of the X-rays produced by the hot gas in Abell 426. What these observations revealed, surprisingly, was a series of concentric ripples, like those seen around a stone thrown into a pond. Through careful analysis of the data, Fabian and his colleagues were able to show that these ripples corresponded to places in the cluster where the density of the gas was slightly higher than the average. On the other hand, in the gaps between the ripples, they found that the gas density was slightly lower than average. Since a higher density means a higher pressure (and a lower density means a lower pressure), the conclusion was inescapable: these ripples are oscillations in pressure, a giant sound wave that thrums throughout this entire vast cluster. Figuring out the pitch of the corresponding note is then relatively easy. We can calculate that the speed of sound in this 30 millionºC gas is about 4.2 million kilometres per hour, and we can measure from the image that the spacing between each ripple is about 36Â€000 light years. For a listener inside the cluster, with this sound wave rushing past them, we simply need to divide the speed of the wave by the spacing of the ripples to determine the rate at which the pressure wave oscillates, and hence which note is playing. We can thus come to the remarkable conclusion that Abell

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426, an unfathomably foreign object 250 million light years away, is humming a B-flat. But this is a B-flat unlike any you’re familiar with: the sound waves in Abell 426 have an oscillation rate of once every 9 million years, which is about 6000 trillion times slower than the lowest note that the human ear can hear. Or to put it another way, you would need to add an additional 635 keys to the left end of a piano keyboard in order to be able to play a note this low! The deep bass note being sung by Abell 426 is not anywhere near as loud as a supernova. The X-ray ripples seen in Abell 426 correspond to a variation in pressure of around 10 per cent, which is a sound level of about 170 decibels, akin to holding your ear directly against the speaker during a major rock concert. This is nowhere near as loud as a supernova explosion, but a supernova is a single deafening crash. In contrast, Abell 426 has been playing a single sustained note for more than 2 billion years, and shows no sign of needing a breath any time soon. The energy needed every second just to hold this note is staggering, a factor of a trillion trillion times larger than the combined output of every power station on Earth. What is the cosmic powerhouse that provides this energy, and why does it manifest itself as sound? The culprit, as is so often in the case for the most energetic events in the cosmos, is a black hole. At the centre of Abell 426 is a large galaxy known as NGCÂ€1275. NGCÂ€1275 in turn harbours a supermassive black hole at its core, with a mass of 400 million suns. While this black hole is not directly visible, we can infer its presence through the enormous levels of light generated by the super-heated mixture of stars and gas that continually spirals down into its throat. Not everything that spirals close to a black hole ends up being consumed. At least some material always manages to escape, and is flung outwards at high speed. Sagittarius A* [the black hole at

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the centre of the Milky Way] has a very modest appetite: it takes 100Â€000 years to consume a mass equivalent to our solar system. Correspondingly, it only occasionally discards its scraps, as evidenced by the small number of hypervelocity stars that have been flung outwards over millions of years. In contrast, the much bigger black hole at the centre of NGCÂ€1275 is far more voracious, and gulps down the mass of our solar system every few weeks. Not surprisingly, the outflow of high-speed material that has experienced a near miss is also high. For reasons we as yet don’t fully understand, this manifests itself in NGCÂ€1275 and many other systems as two oppositely directed high-speed jets of material, which are blasted by the black hole over millions of light years at a significant fraction of the speed of light. In the case of NGCÂ€1275, these twin jets need to force their way through all the gas of the large cluster in which the galaxy is enveloped. Like a garden hose running underwater, the collision of the jets with the cluster gas generates a series of bubbles, which inflate under the jets’ power, and then break off and float outwards. As these bubbles expand, they shove the surrounding gas outwards, setting up the pressure oscillations that then ring through the cluster in that deep B-flat. There are many galaxy clusters throughout the universe, and there are huge numbers of supermassive black holes that generate a pair of jets of outflowing gas. But whether all these factors can combine together to make a single piercing note, and just what pitch that note is played at, hangs on a delicate combination of the rate at which the black hole feeds, the strength of the jets, and the size, density and temperature of the surrounding cluster. Nevertheless, astronomers have now begun to identify other clusters that, like Abell 426, are good at holding a tune. The whole universe appears to be rumbling with the harmonising of the deepest throats imaginable.

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The first sounds At the present time, the universe is filled with the deep roaring of galaxy clusters, the sharp cracks of supernova explosions, and a myriad of other sounds. One way or another, all these sounds are produced by the varied motions and actions of stars, galaxies, black holes and clusters. But these constituents of the cosmos have not always existed. We know that the universe is 13.75 billion years old, and we know that there were times, very early on, when no stars or galaxies had yet formed. So before the first supernova explosion, and before the first supermassive black hole, were the vast stretches of the universe filled with nothing but silence? Or was there a cosmic song long before there were individual singers? What was the first sound in the universe? These questions sound like the sort of thing best left to philosophers. But incredibly, astronomers can answer them with considerable precision. There is very strong evidence that space and time both began with an event known as the ‘Big Bang’, which from our current best estimates occurred 13.75 billion years ago. But despite its name, the Big Bang is thought to have been utterly silent. The distributions of matter and energy created in this sudden cataclysmic event were almost perfectly smooth – there were no oscillations in pressure that could correspond to any noise. However, after much less than a trillion trillionth of a second, when the observable universe had expanded to about the size of a beach ball, the cosmos had become decidedly lumpy. As time passed, and the universe continued to expand, the denser clumps of material used their gravitational attraction to pull in more mass towards them. These clumps then grew in pressure as the gas in them became more tightly squeezed, forcing the gas to expand. As these clouds of gas expanded, their pressure dropped and their expansion slowed. Gravity then

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began to exert itself, and the process repeated. By less than a millisecond after the Big Bang, gas clouds over a whole range of sizes had begun collapsing and expanding, their pressure rising and falling as a consequence. Oscillations of pressure had been established – the universe had found its voice! These first sound waves were a little different from those we’ve talked about previously. Rather than travelling from point A to point B, like my voice sending sound through the air to your ears, these waves oscillated up and down in pressure without actually going anywhere. These are known as ‘standing waves’, and are very similar to the stationary sound waves set up inside a flute or organ pipe. The length of an organ pipe determines the tone of the sound it produces: the smallest organ pipes produce the highest notes. In an analogous way, the age of the observable universe at these early times dictated the pitch of the primordial tune. When the universe was very young, only clumps of matter that were relatively small, and for which the gas was able to expand and contract rapidly, had had enough time to complete one full cycle of pressure oscillations. Correspondingly, the cosmic choir was comprised only of sopranos. As the universe aged, increasingly slower oscillations were completed, and correspondingly deeper notes were added to the chorus. Furthermore, as time went on, the music became louder. This is because the overall level of clumpiness in the universe increased as gravity began to exert its grip. As the clumps grew in size, the contrast between expansion and contraction of gas clouds was higher, and the pressure waves became stronger. So what did the standing waves in the early universe sound like? Just 10 years after the Big Bang, the dominant note in the universe wasÂ€F-sharp (but 35 octaves lower than the lowest note a human ear can perceive), at a volume of 90 decibels (about as loud as standing next to a lawnmower). Over the next 100Â€000 years,

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a whole new set of larger gas clouds were able to begin oscillating: more than 13 octaves of even deeper notes were added to the celestial pipe organ, with the volume increasing by a factor of 20. At any moment in time, just as the largest possible gas cloud was completing its first cycle of collapse and expansion, there were other gas clouds, exactly half the size, which had completed two full cycles, and yet more clouds, half again as large, which had oscillated four times. As a consequence, the loudest note was accompanied by a whole set of fainter harmonics and overtones. However, do not envisage some pleasant sounding (but thunderingly loud!) barbershop quartet. This set of harmonics was not the relatively pure timbre of a musical instrument, but a blurry blend of overlapping notes. The result, if you could hear it, would be a fuzzy hiss, steadily descending in pitch and gaining in volume as the universe aged. This celestial song lasted for 380Â€000 years, but then abruptly ceased, never to resume. What happened to mute this enormous cosmological pipe organ? And how do we know that these sounds ever happened, if they vanished billions of years ago? At early times the universe was a dense fog, because a ray of light was unable to travel even a short distance before colliding with an electron. It was throughout this period, known as the ‘pre-recombination era’, that clumps of gas expanded and collapsed, producing these first sounds. However, after 380Â€000 years, the universe had cooled to a temperature of 2700ºC, cold enough for protons and electrons to combine to form atoms. With this soup of free-floating electrons removed, the skies cleared, and the cosmos became transparent. This process silenced the universe, because it changed the speed of sound. Before recombination, sound waves travelled through a gelatinous mix of light and matter, for which the speed of sound was about 60 per cent of the speed of light, or about 620 million kilometres per hour. At this high sound speed, gas

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clouds were able to collapse and expand relatively quickly. However, once matter and light went their separate ways, the speed of sound plummeted essentially to zero. At the moment of recombination all the sloshing of gas in and out immediately ceased, and the universe became silent. This sudden halt to the cosmic symphony, right at the time when the universe opened itself up for view, means that we cannot see these sound waves as we can for the galaxy cluster Abell 426. So how do we even know that they existed? We know because although these sounds have long since faded, the final crescendo is forever frozen into the very fabric of the cosmos. The moment of recombination left behind the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a faint, cold light that fills the universe. The CMB was discovered in the 1960s, and immediately became the object of detailed study by astronomers around the world. By the 1990s, precision observations were able to show that the glow from the CMB was not completely uniform, but that some parts of the sky were 0.001 per cent warmer or cooler than others. As measurements have continued to improve, these tiny variations (or CMB anisotropies, as they are more formally known) have revealed a spectacularly detailed portrait of the universe at that moment of recombination more than 13 billion years ago, just 380Â€000 years after the Big Bang. Because what these small temperature variations correspond to are individual clumps of gas, frozen in time in the middle of their pressure oscillations in or out. Those oscillations have now ceased their motion, but we can see them at their final positions. It is as if we have a photograph of the orchestra as it hits its final note: the conductor’s arms are raised high, and the performers can all be seen straining with effort as they play their instruments at their loudest volumes. But the sound itself is missing.

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Astronomers have analysed these temperature fluctuations in considerable detail, and have found that the CMB is not comprised of a random jumble of different-sized sized patches of hot and cold, but that regions of higher or lower temperature tend to have certain sizes. In particular, most of the temperature variations that we can see extend over extents on the sky that are about twice the diameter of the full moon. This implies that there is a clear fundamental tone imprinted onto the universe (subsequent analysis has confirmed that this fundamental is accompanied by at least five higher harmonics). We can thus state with considerable accuracy and confidence that the dominant note of the cosmos at recombination was almost exactly 54 octaves below middle C, at an ear-splitting volume of around 120 decibels. This is not quite as deep a note as that sung by Abell 462, but is nonetheless remarkable: to play it, an organ would need a pipe more than 10 trillion kilometres long! After recombination, the universe continued to expand and cool, but it did so in absolute silence. Over the next hundreds of millions of years, clumps of gas that happened to be near maximum contraction at recombination were able to continue collapsing under the influence of gravity, and eventually coalesced into the first stars and galaxies. As these various species gradually emerged from the emptiness, they restored not only light to the universe, but also sound, through noisemakers like the supernova explosions and galaxy clusters described earlier. And the universe has never since stopped talking. There is a final, startling, connection between the strange harmonising of the pre-recombination era and the hubbub that the cosmos experiences today. As we can see directly from the CMB, the hottest gas clumps at recombination (that is, those that were just completing the compression part of their pressure oscillation at the moment the universe became transparent) all had a particular size. The size

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that we see on the sky, about double the size of the full moon, corresponded to a physical extent of 460Â€000 light years at the time of recombination. However, over the more than 13.75 billion years since then, the universe has expanded by more than a factor of 1000. As a consequence, if these regions still existed now, they would have been stretched so that they would now be 500 million light years across. In the early 1980s, astronomers began to measure the threedimensional positions of hundreds of relatively nearby galaxies, and found that they are not scattered uniformly, but are clumped into complicated patterns. The realisation that the universe is not totally chaotic but has a characteristic structure was a remarkable discovery. But in 2005, when astronomers had expanded their catalogues of galaxy positions to many tens of thousands of objects, an even more incredible result emerged. Not only is the distribution of galaxies clumpy, but the size of these clumps is not random. How big is a typical clump of galaxies? Pretty close to 500 million light years, the same size the hot clouds of gas from recombination would be if they had survived through to the present. The conclusion is inescapable: these hot clouds have survived, but have now evolved into galaxies, stars, planets and people. What we see all around us, and indeed what we ourselves are part of, is a fossil record of the oscillating sound waves from the earliest times in history, forever woven into the distribution of matter throughout the cosmos. The first sounds in the universe ceased long ago. The conductor and the musicians have departed the cosmic stage, taking their instruments with them. However, the performers have left behind their sheet music. By studying the cosmic microwave background and the large-scale structure of the universe, we can recover the first music ever played, music that was never intended to be heard.

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f Stars p. 188 Music p. 12 Fossil records p. 126

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String theory ties us in knots Marcelo Gleiser

Einstein spent the last 30 years of his life looking for the unifying force, as did the brilliant pioneers of atomic physics, Heisenberg, Pauli and Schrödinger. Following in their footsteps, I grew up a Platonist, fascinated with the idea of unification: the idea that all the forces of nature are but different expressions of a single force. So I went to graduate school in England to pursue this intellectual Holy Grail and worked on superstring theories, the epitome of the unification dream. But as the years passed I watched with growing apprehension as hundreds of my colleagues published papers on ideas so far removed from reality that they couldn’t (and still can’t) be tested: papers proposing six invisible dimensions of space curled up in a ball a trillionth of a trillionth of a billionth of an inch; or proposing that there is an infinitude of universes out there popping in and out of existence throughout eternity, ours being only one of them; papers suggesting that whenever a measurement is made, reality forks into separate paths, each a different universe. Were they playing intellectual games? Were they delusional, pursuing a fantasy? Had they lost their sense of commitment to their true vocation, the description of natural phenomena? Were they even physicists? Surely, there are natural laws, and they

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reflect observed patterns of organised behaviour. But are these laws the true blueprints of physical reality? Or are they logical descriptions that we create to represent it? I realised that the order we see in Nature is the order we seek in ourselves. And this can be a dangerously misleading game to play. What have we learned in the past decades about our origins? That the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate, that time had a beginning, that the reason we exist at all can be traced back to a fundamental imbalance in the way the particles of matter interact with each other, that only due to random mutations life can thrive and adapt. We have learned that Nature relies on imperfections in order for atoms, people, and galaxies to exist. Gradually, it became clear to me that scientists – and seekers of perfection from all walks of life – have been courting the wrong muse. Neither symmetry nor perfection should be our guiding principle, as they have been for millennia. We don’t have to look for the mind of God in Nature and try to express it through our equations. Imperfect Nature has plenty to offer, if we are willing to embrace its message. The search for an all-embracing theory of Nature inspired by beauty and perfection is misguided, rooted in the monotheistic culture that has for so long dominated Western thought. Superstring theory and the widespread belief that it represents the truth of all existence, is the scientific equivalent of a JewishChristian-Muslim God that designed the cosmos, a theory based on mathematical symmetry as an expression of Nature’s perfection. Even if God is hidden from the equations (and He certainly is), the mythic equivalent of ‘all is one’ persists. The time has come to shift our focus. A new way of thinking about the natural world is emerging that emphasises change and transformation rather than stasis and perfection. Over a century ago, after examining the spatial structure of biomolecules, the building blocks of living matter, Louis

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Pasteur exclaimed, ‘The universe is asymmetric!’ Modern particle physics and cosmology have corroborated this view, proving that the matter comprising all that exists, from atoms and galaxies to people, arises from fundamental asymmetries in Nature. We have found that without asymmetries and imperfections the universe would be filled with nothing but smooth radiation. Stars, people, everything emerges from fundamental imperfections writ deep into Nature’s code. History has taught us that any radical shift in our cosmic view comes with consequences for society. This new take on science will have a liberating effect, freeing us from old-fashioned and vile ‘wars’ between science and religion. People must understand science for what it truly is: a very human narrative that evolves as we discover more about the physical world. What science does offer, however, is a spiritual path to embrace Nature: we are creatures of the cosmos, a cosmos that has no particular plan for us. We have probed into other worlds in our cosmic neighbourhood, only to realise how rare and precious life is. We live in a precarious oasis in a universe that is violently hostile to life. Accepting this will elevate us to a new moral plane that celebrates and protects what we have, while we still have it.

f Philosophy p. 192 History p. 158 Science p. 17

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Deepak Chopra: Misunderstanding physics since he willed himself into existence Richard Hughes

So, about a month ago an article by Deepak Chopra came to my attention … It’s called Which Is Real, the Moon or God? and it manages to be even dumber than its name suggests. Chopra begins: Most people have spent at least a few minutes pondering a famous riddle, although they may not know that it originated in Zen Buddhism: If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Strangely, this turns out to be a pivotal question if you want to prove that God exists, or doesn’t.

I’m pretty sure that as a child I was able to figure out the answer to this riddle – that Chopra still thinks it is worth pondering places him firmly in the remedial class for insufferably smug people. For those of you who are wondering, the answer is ‘yes’, unless the tree is falling in a vacuum in which case a better riddle to ponder might be, ‘How the hell did this tree manage to grow in a f––ing vacuum?’

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Really, this has been sorted out ever since we realised that, far from being mystical or mysterious, sound is just the propagation of compression waves through a medium – thus the very act of falling requires the production of sound provided there is a medium for the waves to propagate through. Not for Chopra of course – compression waves just aren’t Zen enough for him, apparently, and so he continues to ask a question which, while perfectly fine for a pre-scientific culture to ask, is a bit embarrassing to keep asking in this day and age. That’s not even the finest Choprawoo in the article, though. For example: What you think about reality depends on quantum physics, and since God is the ultimate reality, His existence hinges on such things as waves and particles.

Holy meaningless blather, Batman! You’d think that writing pseudo-scientific drivel for years would have honed Chopra’s skill somewhat, but apparently not. Here’s a hint for you – ‘God is the ultimate reality’ is not profound, it is bullshit wrapped in a homily. And if you’re going to talk about physics, at least try to make an effort … Here, the discussion gets rather technical, but let’s venture forward on a basic question. Does the moon exist if no one is there to see it?

… maybe take an undergraduate physics course … The common sense notion is that of course the moon exists without human beings to look at it. It existed long before life on Earth; it will be around if human folly wipes out our species in some possible future. People aren’t going to be argued out of common sense, no matter how tricky your

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science or philosophy. Yet, surprisingly, physics starts to fall apart if you cling too stubbornly to common sense.

… or even just crack open a physics textbook? I mean, really – I’m embarrassed for you. It would be consistent with common sense if these particles, and the subatomic particles that they can be broken down into, were solid and stable in spacetime. But they aren’t. Thanks to two breakthrough ideas – the Uncertainty Principle and the Observer Effect – nothing in Nature can be seen as solid and fixed in spacetime.

Rampant capitalisation aside, what’s going on here is a classic case of the old adage, ‘A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.’ Evidently, Deepak once had someone describe the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (HUP) to him down a noisy phone line and he never bothered to follow up on any of the information. The HUP essentially states that, for any two related quantities, you can’t measure both with arbitrary precision. Most famously, we have the relationship: DDpħ /â•›2

which states that the uncertainty in the position of a particle times the uncertainty in the momentum of a particle has to be greater than or equal to ħ/2. So at a first glance it might seem that Deepak is right after all. But, inquiring minds might say, how big exactly is this minimum value of ħ/2? Well, to start with we have: ħ = 1.05457148 x 10–34 m2kg/s which for those of you who aren’t au fait with scientific

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exponential notation is a zero, followed by a decimal point, followed by 33 zeroes before the rest of the number starts. That is clearly an extremely small number – so much so that at the macroscopic scale the HUP is all but worthless. There’s just no way to measure macroscopic objects with high enough precision for the HUP to matter. If you had a basketball, and you measured its mass accurate to the nearest milligram, its position accurate to the nearest micrometre, and its velocity to the nearest micrometre per second, you’d still have a product of uncertainties around 15 orders of magnitude too large for the HUP to come into play. This subtlety of quantum mechanics – namely, that the reason it doesn’t apply on the macro-level is not some scientific decree or consensus but is a direct consequence of the maths involved – is entirely lost on Chopra, and he continues on through the rest of the article applying the same types of misunderstanding to various aspects of quantum mechanics, mincing it all in with a good ol’ dose of word salad. If you want a good example of his pseudo-profundity masquerading as wisdom, you need only take a look at the end of his article: Consciousness observes itself, and it observes its creations. God does the same thing, which is why sages have wondered if everything doesn’t take place in God’s mind. Ultimately, it does. But you have to adopt a new model of God that is consciousness-based. Once you do, a host of issues becomes clear. Not just about the moon, but about human beings and what our own future will be like.

That clears things up nicely, then, doesn’t it, Deepak. Deepak? Deepak? Stop rolling in that pile of money, goddamn it, Deepak, there’s work to be done and this bullshit won’t write itself …

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f Debunking p. 17 Blogs p. 28 Zeroes p. 162

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Twinkling stars Karl Kruszelnicki

One of the best-known rhymes in the English language is ‘Twinkle twinkle little star, How I wonder what you are’. The rhyme’s author, Jane Taylor, first published it way back in 1806, in a book called Rhymes for the Nursery. She called the poem ‘The Star’ for its first publication. And sure enough, if you look up at the night sky, the stars really do seem to twinkle. But the reality is that stars don’t twinkle.

Stars are not constant candles … The stars we see at night are huge objects, of the order of a million kilometres in diameter. All the stars that we can see with the naked eye are quite close to us, and well and truly inside our galaxy, the Milky Way. For a star to actually ‘twinkle’, it would have to get brighter and duller by a noticeable amount, and do this a few times per second. Stars can in fact vary their brightness, but not a few times per second. For example, our star, the sun, will change its brightness by 0.1 per cent (or one part in a thousand) over the solar cycle, which is about 11 years. We’ve been mapping this for about 400 years.

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Recent peaks were in 1991 and 2002, with the next one expected around 2013/14, and so on. There are some uncommon stars, called variable stars, that can vary in brightness not by one part per thousand, but up to 10Â€000 times. They can do this over periods from as short as a few hours to as long as a year. Some stars will destroy themselves in a gigantic explosion called a supernova, becoming millions or billions of times brighter than normal. Of course they can do that only once. But no stars can vary their brightness as much and as quickly as the twinkling star in the nursery rhyme would have us believe.

… but that’s not why they twinkle So what makes stars seem to twinkle, to the joy of stargazers, but to the intense annoyance of astronomers? The answer is our atmosphere – that turbulent, fragile, translucent ocean of 5 trillion tonnes of air that is our window to the heavens. Imagine that you are looking at the bottom of a shallow pond, with the surface of the water totally smooth. Everything on the bottom of the pond is easy to see. Suddenly, a wind springs up, rippling the surface of the water – and the floor of the pond now appears fuzzy. Then, to make matters worse, a stream of turbulent water suddenly begins to flow into the pond exactly where you are looking. Now it’s impossible to pick out small details on the bottom. The ‘twinkling’ water blurs all the details. You can see another example of ‘twinkling’ on a country road on a hot day – the shiny ‘lake’ in the distance. The sun heats up the dark road, which heats up the air immediately above the road. The hot air next to the road bends the light more than the cooler air in the next layer higher up. The effect of all this is to make a virtual mirror out of this hot air. This ‘mirror’ reflects the sky, and so you see a shiny patch on the road off in the distance.

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So that ‘water’ in the road ahead is just the sky. In the same way, our atmosphere can make the stars above appear to twinkle. In our atmosphere there are hot and cold areas. They appear as millions of columns or ‘bundles’ of warmer or colder air, tens of centimetres across, and at an altitude of several kilometres. As the light from a star passes through these columns, on its journey down to the ground, it gets bent this way and that. The actual point size of the star is very small, but the turbulent air makes it look much bigger. ‘I think I preferred you when you were a collapsing cloud of material composed primarily of hydrogen, along with helium and trace amounts of heavier elements,’ said the moon.

How to fix twinkling The fact that air can bend light was first noted by the ancient Greek astronomer Cleomedes. In 1706, the great thinker Sir Isaac Newton, in his work Opticks, proposed that a solution to air turbulence interfering with telescope viewing might be found ‘… in a most serene and quiet Air, such as may be found on the tops of the highest Mountains above the grosser Clouds’. Indeed, many of today’s great telescopes are in such locations. The whole point of the Hubble Space Telescope was to get a biggish telescope totally above the turbulent air. Indeed, the astronauts on the International Space Station get to see the stars without any added twinkling. The astronaut Jap Apt, who helped launch the Compton Gamma Ray Telescope, said in 1991, ‘For one thing, the stars don’t twinkle because you’re above the atmosphere.’ And the astronaut Dr Edgar Mitchell, who went to the moon in Apollo 14, said, ‘Without the atmosphere to block, the stars don’t twinkle.’ But there is a second way for astronomers to get around the twinkling of stars. First, they use a laser to measure exactly how

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much the atmosphere is interfering with the incoming starlight. Second, they use this information to distort the mirror of the telescope, hundreds of times each second, to compensate for this interference. The US Air Force first used this technology in 1982, to peek at Soviet satellites. When the technology was declassified, the astronomers began using it. By 1990, it was built into the 3.6 metre telescope at La Silla, in Chile. A third way for astronomers to get a clear image, unperturbed by twinkling, is to take a very short exposure, say 1⁄100 of a second. But this will work only with very bright objects. So the light from a distant star flies unperturbed for thousands of years, only to get massively distorted in its last dozens of microseconds of flight before it lands, as a twinkle, in our eyes.

f Stars p. 98 Twinkles (in a father’s eye) p. 62

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Flesh and stardust Richard King

When I was growing up in England, I didn’t have a chemistry set, but I did have a television set, and on that television set, once a week for what seemed like an age, a man called Johnny Ball would appear and tell me about all manner of science subjects, from geology to biology to physics and astronomy. A presenter of preternatural energy, Ball was a marvellous entertainer whose enthusiasm for his subject was obvious and whose ability to convey often complex ideas with the aid of eccentric and implausible gizmos remains, as far as I know, unsurpassed. He was, and indeed still is, regarded with enormous affection in the United Kingdom – an affection given extra depth for my generation of thirty-somethings by the fact that he had also presented Play School and thus seems, in a benign way, to have presided over whole childhoods. But the real reason for Ball’s popularity is that he managed to instil a love of science. A one-man Enlightenment, he kindled our interest. And the flame continued to burn, for a while. It burned in the form of Mrs Maclaren, who took us for chemistry lessons at school. In fact, ‘burned’ is precisely the word. For Matches Maclaren could not go an hour without burning something, usually a little strip of magnesium, which, when held over a Bunsen

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flame, would flare up suddenly into a brilliant white nova. Or else she would take a small ball of sodium and place it in a waterfilled dish, where it skipped and fizzed and whizzed around, slowly dissolving to nothing as it did so. I can’t recall the point of these experiments, but I do remember loving them and being more than a little upset when Mrs Maclaren was pensioned off and replaced by a teacher whose name I forget but whose lugubrious demeanour and patchy beard made me feel strangely queasy. Thus it was that I began, very slowly, to turn away from science subjects and towards the world of English literature. I have never regretted my choice of subject. Literature, and poetry in particular, has given my life a direction and meaning that I’m certain it would have lacked otherwise. But I do regret the comprehensiveness with which I turned my back on science, and sometimes this regret extends to a wish that my children will not make the same mistake, and may even take the road less travelled. The other day, our little boy was staring up at the lights in the kitchen with a faraway look in his eyes. ‘Perhaps’, I said, ‘you’ll be an astronomer.’ Hearing this, and utterly frazzled from a day spent chasing this nascent Galileo from one scene of devastation to the next, my wife gave the only sensible response: ‘Perhaps he’ll be an electrician.’ In any case, in recent years I’ve tried to mend the holes in my knowledge, or at least slow the rate at which my ignorance is, like the universe, constantly expanding. Of course I tend to come at the subject from a literary rather than a technical perspective and herein lies the problem, as I see it. For notwithstanding excellent novels such as Ian McEwan’s Saturday, with its scalpel-like descriptions of brain surgery, literature that treats of scientific themes appears to be very thin on the ground. A theoretical physicist in Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time articulates my frustration perfectly:

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Shakespeare would have grasped wave functions, Donne would have understood complementarity and relative time. They would have been excited. What richness! They would have plundered this new science for their imagery. And they would have educated their audiences too. But you ‘arts’ people, you’re not only ignorant of these magnificent things, you’re rather proud of knowing nothing.

But for a bit of role reversal this would be called philistinism. And while I don’t believe for a minute that the ignorance is all one way, it does seem to me to be more pronounced on the literary than on the scientific side. ‘When I find myself in the company of scientists,’ wrote W.H. Auden in ‘Poet and the City’, ‘I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.’ But Auden was exceptional. In Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins swaps the costumes on this little play, suggesting that, more often than not, it’s the scientists who feel like shabby curates and the poets who are regarded as dukes. Dawkins’ book began life as a lecture, delivered in 1997 in honour of the author C.P. Snow. And it so happens that 2009 marked the 50th anniversary of Snow’s Rede Lecture for 1959, in which Snow identified a division between literary intellectuals on the one hand and scientists and engineers on the other. Delivered at Cambridge University and entitled ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’, its effect was to ignite a widespread debate. It begins with a biographical passage in which Snow describes his growing sense of a sort of mutual indifference on the part of literary intellectuals and scientists. Snow, a scientist and a novelist, had friends on both sides of this divide and was keen to understand why it was that scientists spoke only to other scientists and literary intellectuals to other literary intellectuals. As he puts it:

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I felt I was moving among two groups … who had almost ceased to communicate at all, who in intellectual, moral and psychological climate had so little in common that instead of going from Burlington House or South Kensington to Chelsea, one might have crossed an ocean.

Had Snow identified a genuine divide, or something temporary and peculiar to England? Certainly, it’s far more usual these days to hear of the conflict between science and religion than of the conflict between science and literature. But that Snow had put his finger on something, some mutual distrust or disregard, is surely not to be seriously doubted. Historically, science and literature just don’t get along as well as they might. Nevertheless, there are certain commentators who think that Snow overstated the case. One such was the late great Stephen Jay Gould, who, in 1959, was an undergraduate at Antioch College, yet to establish himself as one of the greatest and subtlest science writers of all time. In The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister’s Pox he takes up Snow’s own observation that ‘the number two is a very dangerous number’. As Gould puts it: ‘From the dawn of recorded human rumination, our best philosophers have noted, and usually lamented, our strong tendency to frame any complex issue as a battle between two opposing camps.’ Gould suspected that this predilection lay deep within our mental architecture, as an evolved property of the human brain. But whatever the reasons for this quirk, or glitch, Gould sees Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’ lecture as evidence of the dangers of dichotomisation. Gould’s thesis is that the animosity between literary intellectuals and scientists is essentially a ‘pseudo-conflict’ born of an understandable vigilance, or ‘scrappiness’, on science’s part, when it first began to emerge as a rival to other, older forms of knowledge. Early scientists such as Francis Bacon expressed ideas that inevitably clashed with ‘the hidebound traditions of

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humanistic scholarship’. But the conflict has become ‘unseemly and inappropriate’. Both science and literature, Gould suggests, should adopt the strategies of the fox and the hedgehog, which is to say that there will be times when it is useful for the two ‘magisteria’ to collaborate (as the fox is able to modify its tactics) and times when both must go their own way, adopting strategies peculiar to each (as the hedgehog invariably rolls itself into a spiky ball to put off predators). Well, he’ll get no argument there. But to say that the conflict between science and literature has become ‘unseemly and inappropriate’ is not to say that it doesn’t exist. If there is a conflict, Snow was right to identify it, and any unconscious parochialism on his part is ultimately beside the point. Moreover, Gould writes of ‘occasional strife’ between the humanities and the physical sciences. But the briefest foray into literary history reveals that the strife is far from occasional. On the contrary, it immediately strikes one as chronic. Despite the metaphysical poets, who would sometimes include scientific discoveries in their intricate intellectual exercises, and despite Pope’s famous epitaph for Newton – ‘Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night: / God said, let Newton be! And all was Light’ – literature, and poetry in particular, has shown a bizarre negativity towards science. For Edgar Allan Poe, science was a ‘Vulture, whose wings are dull realities’; for Keats, it ‘will clip an Angel’s wings, / Conquer all mysteries’ and ‘Unweave a rainbow’. And then there is my personal favourite: Walt Whitman stomping off from the astronomy lecture to gaze ‘in perfect silence at the stars’ – a Romantic tantrum in a class of its own. Even poets in sympathy with science don’t always do a brilliant job of conveying that sympathy to their readers. Shelley recognised a profoundly poetical element in science, though still thought facts and calculation served to dull the poetic spirit. And

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while it’s true that Samuel Taylor Coleridge attended lectures at the Royal Institution in order to renew his ‘stock of metaphors’, he, like Keats, had it in for Newton. Erasmus Darwin, whose The Botanic Garden anticipates the Big Bang theory of the universe, nevertheless sought to leaven his epic with gnomes, sylphs, nymphs and goddesses. Of course it isn’t only the poets who display a lack of love for science. Novelists, too, are guilty of coldness. As with poetry, the principal problem is really one of indifference, but that is not the whole story. Of the novels that do engage with science, many take a largely negative view. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Honoré de Balzac’s Quest for the Absolute all warn against scientific excess. Models of hubris whose reckless curiosity has invariably set them on the road to ruin, the scientists who populate such works of fiction are less Promethean than Faustian. So let us say that Snow was right and that literature is out of love with science. What, if anything, can we do about it? Indeed, what sort of relationship can exist between the two magisteria beyond the obvious and boring one of simply swapping bits of information? (‘I’ll quote Pope in the preface to my book if you write a poem comparing memory to a trilobite.’) Can literature adopt the techniques of science? Daft though it sounds, it has been tried. Think of the novels of Emile Zola, whose ‘naturalism’ was influenced by evolution and who saw heredity and environment as determining influences on human behaviour. Or think of William Carlos Williams’ ‘relatively stable’ poetic line – a nod to Einstein’s relativity, which also influenced the modernist poetry of Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson. Perhaps the most ambitious book to deal with the divide between the sciences and the humanities is E.O. Wilson’s Consilience, in which Wilson argues that science’s role in respect of

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literature and the arts in general is (or should be) largely one of interpretation. Consilience means ‘a jumping together’ – in this instance, a jumping together of facts and fact-based theories across the disciplines to create ‘a common groundwork of explanation’. But Wilson, who regards this jumping together as a consolidation of the Enlightenment project, leaves the reader in little doubt that it is to science and not to the humanities that the lion’s share of the work must fall when it comes to this ‘attempted linkage’. For example, he writes that: Artistic inspiration common to everyone in varying degree rises from the artesian wells of human nature … It follows that even the greatest works of art might be understood fundamentally with knowledge of the biologically evolved epigenetic rules that guided them.

Many writers and artists regarded this as a bridge too far and, indeed, as a road to nowhere. Gould suggests that Wilson has misunderstood the meaning of ‘consilience’ and suspects him of wanting to incorporate all knowledge into a single hierarchy, with science at the top. New Yorker critic Louis Menand put it less diplomatically. Consilience, he wrote, is a ‘bargain with the devil’. Of course the sciences have plenty to tell us about the nature and origins of literature and, indeed, of the arts generally. Quite apart from anything else, the products of the human mind cannot be treated in isolation. But this is not what Wilson is arguing for. He is arguing for a subsumation, a homogenisation based on the idea that human beings are naturally evolved creatures and that such works of art and culture as they’ve produced must therefore have a natural explanation. His approach has much in common with that of the so-called Literary Darwinists, whose stated aim is to bring the theory of evolution to bear on literature, largely

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as an interpretive tool. ‘Is narrative well-engineered to perform a fitness-promoting task?’ asks one of the contributors to The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative. I don’t think it’s putting it too strongly to say that here an understandable bullishness on the part of the devotees of science has left a heap of bullshit in its wake. Then again, the Literary Darwinists could claim to be fighting fire with fire, or at least to be fighting bullshit with bullshit. And indeed it is true that Literary Darwinism is in part a response to the ‘constructivist’ project to claim all knowledge in the name of culture, an undertaking that would make of science just another official ‘discourse’. In his 1998 essay ‘Oppressed by Evolution’ in Discover magazine, American anthropologist Matt Cartmill gives an excellent summary of this world view: The postmodern critique of science runs something like this: There are no objective facts. All supposed ‘facts’ are contaminated with theories, and all theories are infested with moral and political doctrines. Because different theories express different perceptions of the world, there’s no neutral yardstick for measuring one against another. The choice between competing theories is always a political choice. Therefore, when some guy in a lab coat tells you that such and such is an objective fact – say, that there isn’t any firmament, or that people are related to wolves and hyenas – he must have a political agenda up his starched white sleeve.

If the guiding principle of Wilson’s consilience is that everything can be known through science, a principle of postmodern cultural studies is that nothing at all can be known through science, or indeed through any other form of knowledge. This view was most famously satirised by the physics professor Alan Sokal,

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who claimed to have seen the postmodern light and conned the journal Social Text, one of whose editors was Frederic Jameson, into printing an essay entitled ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’, which, among other points just as ludicrous, called for an ‘emancipatory mathematics’. Needless to say, these minor scuffles in the strip-lit halls of academe are a sideshow to the main event, which is literature’s apparent inability meaningfully to engage with scientific subjects. But they do allow us to begin to think of the limits imposed on any engagement by the irreducible differences that obtain between the disciplines. Indeed, one tenet of post-structuralist theory – that language, or ‘discourse’, is essentially unstable – cannot be underestimated. Words are not passive, univocal counters; they do not suffer reality, but are constantly engaged in re-creating it. The language of physics is mathematics. Its characters, as Galileo said, are numbers and geometrical figures. The language of literature is, well, language. And while language can do a lot of things, there are lots of things it cannot do. Primo Levi understood this well. An industrial chemist as well as a writer, he was aware that science and literature cannot exist in a frictionless relationship. The final chapter of The Periodic Table, ‘The Story of a Carbon Atom’, is a matchless piece of science writing but is drenched in an awareness of the limits of language. Then there is the title story in his posthumous collection, A Tranquil Star, which begins with a wonderful demonstration of the fact that language has ‘our dimensions’: Once upon a time, somewhere in the universe very far away from here, lived a tranquil star, which moved tranquilly in the immensity of the sky, surrounded by a crowd of tranquil planets about which we have not a thing to report. This star was very big and very hot, and

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its weight was enormous: and here a reporter’s difficulties begin. We have written ‘very far’, ‘big’, ‘hot’, ‘enormous’: Australia is very far, an elephant is big and a house is bigger, this morning I had a hot bath, Everest is enormous. It’s clear that something in our lexicon isn’t working.

The ‘trade of clothing facts in words is bound by its very nature to fail’, writes Levi in The Periodic Table. Both the science of the very big and the science of the very small reveal the limits of human perception and intuition unaided by mathematics. This hasn’t stopped scientists attempting to put scientific data into terms the non-scientist can understand. To this end, they have adopted various strategies designed to appeal to readers unused to scientific thinking. One such is the importation of figures and narratives from literature. Indeed, it is striking how many science books allude to literary works in their titles: The Ancestor’s Tale, by Richard Dawkins; The Nothing that Is, by Robert Kaplan; The Goldilocks Enigma, by Paul Davies; Six Impossible Things before Breakfast, by Lewis Wolpert. However, it is science writing itself that must be regarded as an exciting new branch of the humanistic literary tradition. According to Gould, such popular writers are regarded by many in the scientific community as pedlars of gee-whiz simplification – an irrelevant caste to be treated with disdain. Most scientists, he suggests, take a kind of pride in their own lack of stylistic acumen, immersing themselves in technical jargon that is so much white noise to those reading for pleasure. And yet the popularisers, taken as a group, strike me as profoundly exciting. Many display a stylistic aptitude that would be the envy of certain novelists. There is even a prize, the Lewis Thomas Prize, awarded for popular science writing that provides ‘not merely new information but cause for reflection, even revelation, as in a poem’. The best science writing, it seems to me, combines two senses

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of the verb ‘to wonder’: to wonder about – to speculate – and to wonder at – to be amazed. The great science writer opens up our world in ways we could never have anticipated. One of my favourite science writers is the celebrated J.B.S. Haldane, a geneticist and evolutionary biologist whose 1927 essay ‘On Being the Right Size’ must be accounted one of the great scientific essays. In it, Haldane demonstrates that all animals have an optimum size and that observations such as the common one that if a flea were as big as a human being it could jump a thousand feet in the air are unscientific nonsense. Haldane begins with an illustration from John Bunyan’s allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress. Here, he considers the feasibility of Giant Pope and Giant Pagan: These monsters were not only ten times as high as Christian, but ten times as wide and ten times as thick, so that their total weight was a thousand times his, or about eighty to ninety tons. Unfortunately the cross-sections of their bones were only a hundred times those of Christian, so that every square inch of giant bone had to support ten times the weight borne by a square inch of human bone. As the human thigh-bone breaks under about ten times the human weight, Pope and Pagan would have broken their thighs every time they took a step.

He goes on in this vein, debunking, demystifying, always with a view to showing how facts can often be more interesting than fiction. Indeed, it is on the greatest fiction, the fiction that a creator-God intervenes in the affairs of human beings, that he turns his gaze most penetratingly. A little further on, he writes: An angel whose muscles developed no more power weight for weight than those of an eagle or a pigeon would require a breast projecting for about four feet to house the

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muscles engaged in working its wings, while to economise its weight, its legs would have to be reduced to mere stilts.

Of course, too much stylistic facility can work against the material. Good science writers, in my experience, are far less likely to mix a metaphor or engage in elegant variation than most socalled creative writers. Probably this is helped by the fact that the content is sometimes so astonishing it doesn’t need to be dressed up. ‘In a sense human flesh is made of stardust,’ writes Nigel Calder in The Key to the Universe. To try to express that thought by analogy would be like drenching a truffle in ketchup. To generalise massively, one could say that while science partakes of the techniques of literature, literature partakes of the content of science. A novel can contain an explanation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But the Second Law of Thermodynamics can obviously not contain a novel. Nevertheless, and despite its ability to move across different disciplines, literature that seeks to incorporate science has high hurdles to clear. For example, there’s its attachment to metaphor, the effect of which is to turn phenomena into indicators for something else. John Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is not an attempt to understand nightingales but rather a poem of lyric crisis. Similarly, Hardy’s darkling thrush is not a real thrush at all but the beruffled emblem of beleaguered hope. This is a problem, if it is a problem, that tests relations between science and literature, as the first looks outwards to objective phenomena and the second tends to focus inwards. Sometimes, however, a metaphor comes along that no sane writer can resist adopting. One such is the world of quantum mechanics, which is to say the baffling world of subatomic particles, where nothing seems to move as it should and in which Newton’s laws don’t appear to apply. And indeed it is this that so appeals to the literary imagination – a perfect metaphor for

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human behaviour, volatile and unpredictable as it is. Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, a work that manages to convey the excitement of modern scientific inquiry, is exemplary in this regard. But quantum mechanics and human relationships, even as they stand in for each other, cannot be accorded equal status in a literary work of art. It is saying nothing original to note that scientific knowledge and literary ‘knowledge’ differ intrinsically, that many of the questions posed by one discipline cannot, in principle, be answered by the other. Strangely, there is often confusion on this point. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’, wrote Keats in his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, a line that one finds time and again on the lips of scientists and mathematicians eager to be seen in the poet’s company. But the truth and beauty available to science are not the same as the truth and beauty available to literary works of art. When, in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, Yeats writes, ‘An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick, unless / Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress’, he isn’t putting forward an objective truth: not even Yeats is daft enough to think that a life is less important than art. But we recognise these magnificent lines as true at the emotional level, for we have all felt something like that, have we not? Conversely, that energy is equivalent to mass multiplied by the speed of light squared is objectively true and true for all time. It is also ‘beautiful’, as Einstein saw, but not in the way that Yeats is beautiful. Still, we are not to be blamed for wishing that William had at least acknowledged Albert. The immediate object of art is us. By contrast, the human element, or angle, can only get science and scientists so far. It is fun to reflect that a glass of Evian contains at least one water molecule that passed through the bladder of Oliver Cromwell. And it is good to remember the human drama that so often attends scientific discovery. It is this with which Brecht is concerned in his play

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Galileo, and indeed it is a thrilling story that attaches to the father of modern astronomy. Ultimately, however, it’s the astronomy that matters. Before long, the human element recedes and the reader is faced with the movement of the planets – with the science and the mathematics. That is all I mean when I say that science and literature differ intrinsically. Jacob Bronowski – a poet, historian, teacher, inventor, mathematician, literary critic and philosopher of science – put it well in a New Yorker profile: ‘One of the theorems in Euclid is that an angle cannot be trisected with the ordinary tools – a compass and a ruler. But King Lear was not written to tell us that you cannot trisect a kingdom.’ However, there is a kind of writing that seems to me to point the way to a healthy and mutually respectful relationship between the physical sciences and literature. This kind of writing does not have a name, but one finds it in novels as well as in poems, in popular science and (especially) in nature writing. Perhaps it is better described as an attitude than as a literary style or mode of approach. In any case, its guiding principle, if it has one, is observation of the world as it is – a due respect for what is in front of you as opposed to, or as well as, what is inside you. A good example can be found in a book of almost excruciating beauty: Nature Cure, by Richard Mabey. The book, a memoir of depression and recovery, begins as the author is leaving the one state and tentatively entering upon the other. This passage comes close to the start of the book. Mabey is describing a fledgling swift, which he has discovered ‘beached’ in his attic. He releases it from his attic window and imagines the journey that lies ahead of it: It would be flying the 6,000 miles entirely on its own, on a course mapped out – or at least sketched out – deep in its central nervous system. Every one of its senses would be helping to guide it, checking its progress against genetic memories, generating who knows what astonishing

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experiences of consciousness. Maybe, like many seabirds, it would be picking up subtle changes in air-borne particles as it passed over seas and aromatic shrubland and the dusty thermals above African townships. It might be riding a magnetic trail detected by iron-rich cells in its forebrain. It would almost certainly be using, as navigation aids, landmarks whose shapes fitted templates in its genetic memories, and the sun too, and, on clear nights, the big constellations – which, half-way through its journey, would be replaced by a quite different set in the night sky of the southern hemisphere.

Note how the facts do not detract from – indeed they enhance – the poetry of this passage. Note, too, how they act as a kind of ballast to the bird’s plainly metaphorical status. The beached swift metaphorically figures the slough in which the author finds himself, or rather has found himself up to this point, just as its flight metaphorically figures the trembling first steps on the road to recovery. But the bird is so obviously more than a metaphor. The facts – those breathtaking facts – set it free. In one sense, it becomes a metaphor for its own non-metaphorical existence. Writing in 1959, in the year Snow gave his ‘Two Cultures’ lecture, Vladimir Nabokov, a talented lepidopterist, wrote, ‘I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is.’ I can’t think of a better summary of the kind of writing I’m trying to describe. It is a kind of writing in which, I think, analogy must edge out metaphor, as the poet or writer tries to puncture the anaesthetic of familiarity without trying to turn the thing described into a signpost or counter for something else. ‘Does sense so stale that it must needs derange / The world to know it?’ asks Richard Wilbur. Well ‘yes’ is my answer, but not too much; not as much as Keats and the nightingale, though of course I wouldn’t be without them.

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This kind of writing is far from new. Indeed, it has an illustrious history. Elisabeth Bishop, in a letter to Anne Stevenson: reading Darwin, one admires the beautiful and solid case being built up out of his endless heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic – and then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one feels the strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown. What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.

It is fitting, perhaps, that it should fall to a poet describing the prose of our greatest scientist to end this little mental adventure. But let me add one final thought. It happens that 2009 also marked the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth in 1809. It would, I think, be a fitting tribute if the literary world could begin to consider the ways in which literature can better do justice to the natural richness that he helped to explain. And, indeed, to the fact that this richness began as nothing more than stardust.

f Novels p. 1 Chemistry p. 44 Facts p. 17

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Is anybody out there? Paul Davies

Absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence.

Donald Rumsfeld (on weapons of mass destruction)

What if ET calls tomorrow? On a cold and misty morning in April 1960, a young astronomer named Frank Drake quietly took control of the 26-metre dish at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. Few people understood that this moment was a turning point in science. Slowly and methodically Drake steered the giant instrument towards a sun-like star known as Tau Ceti, 11 light years away, tuned in to 1420 MHz, and settled down to wait. His fervent hope was that alien beings on a planet orbiting Tau Ceti might just be sending radio signals our way, and that his powerful radio dish would detect them. Drake stared at the pen and ink chart recording the antenna’s reception, its fitful spasms accompanied by a hiss from the audio feed. After about half an hour he concluded there was nothing of significance coming from Tau Ceti – just the usual radio static and natural background from space. Taking a deep breath, he carefully reoriented the big dish towards a second star, Epsilon Eridani. Suddenly,

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a series of dramatic booms emanated from the loudspeaker and the pen recorder began frantically flying back and forth. Drake almost fell off his chair. The antenna had clearly picked up a strong artificial signal. The astronomer was so taken aback that he remained rooted to the spot for a long while. Finally, getting his brain in gear, he moved the telescope slightly off target. The signal faded. But when he moved the antenna back, the signal had disappeared! Could this really have been a fleeting broadcast from ET? Drake quickly realised that picking up a signal from an alien civilisation on the second attempt was too good to be true. The explanation must lie with a man-made source, and sure enough, the signal turned out to be produced by a secret military radar establishment. With these humble beginnings – whimsically called Project Ozma after the mythical Land of Oz – Frank Drake pioneered the most ambitious, and potentially the most significant, research project in history. Known as SETI, for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, it seeks to answer one of the biggest of the big questions of existence: Are we alone in the universe? Most of the SETI program builds on Drake’s original concept of sweeping the skies with radio telescopes for any hint of a message from the stars. It is clearly a high-stakes endeavour. The consequences of success would be truly momentous, having a greater impact on humanity than the discoveries of Copernicus, Darwin and Einstein put together. But it is a needle-in-a-haystack search without any guarantee that a needle is even there. Apart from one or two intriguing incidents, all attempts have so far been greeted with an eerie silence. What does that tell us? That there are no aliens? Or that we have been looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time? SETI astronomers say the silence is no surprise: they simply haven’t looked hard enough for long enough. To date, the searches have scrutinised only a few thousand stars within 100 light years

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or so. Compare this to the scale of our galaxy as a whole – 400 billion stars spread over 100Â€000 light years of space. And there are billions of other galaxies. But the power of the search is expanding all the time, following its own version of Moore’s Law for computers, doubling every year or two, driven by surging instrument efficiency and data-processing speed. Now the scope is set to improve dramatically, with the construction of 350 interlinked radio dishes at Hat Creek in Northern California. Named after the benefactor Paul Allen, the Allen Telescope Array will enable researchers to monitor a much larger fraction of the galaxy for alien signals. The facility is operated by the University of California, Berkeley, and the SETI Institute, which is where Frank Drake now works. The institute remains upbeat about the prospects for success, and keeps champagne permanently on ice in anticipation of a definitive detection event. It’s easy to picture the scene if the optimism is right, and something is found soon. An astronomer sits stoically at the controls of the instrument, his feet stuck up on a desk cluttered with papers. Absently, he thumbs though a mathematics textbook. So it has been for him, and dozens of others engaged in SETI, for decade after decade. But today is different. Suddenly the bored astronomer is startled out of his reverie by the shrill, distinctive sound of an alarm. The screech is generated by a computer algorithm designed to spot ‘funny’ radio signals and separate them from the clutter continually being received from outer space. At first, the astronomer assumes it’s just another one of those false alarms, usually a man-made transmission that slips through the net designed to filter out obvious artificial signals coming from mobile phones, radar and satellites. Adhering to the time-honoured protocol, the astronomer keys in some simple instructions and moves the telescope slightly off the target star. The signal immediately dies. He moves the instrument back on target and the signal is still there. After carefully studying the radio wave

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form and determining that the source remains at a fixed location relative to the stars, the astronomer quickly places a telephone call to a companion observatory involved in the project and simultaneously emails the coordinates of the mystery signal. Five thousand miles away, another astronomer is called out of bed to investigate. Drowsily she wanders to the control room and pours herself a coffee. Then, shaking the sleep from her head, she checks her email and enters the given coordinates. Within a minute the second radio telescope has locked onto the target and immediately picks up the same signal, loud and clear. Her pulse begins to race. Is it conceivable that this time the alert is for real? After decades of unrewarded search, might she be the first person on Earth to confirm that an alien civilisation really exists and is transmitting radio signals? She knows that many more checks will be needed before leaping to that conclusion, but the two astronomers, now in excited telephone conversation between different continents, systematically eliminate one mundane possibility after another until, with 90 per cent certainty, they infer that the signal is indeed artificial, non-human and originating far, far out in space. As the radio telescopes continue to track in synchrony and record every minute detail, the dazed pair behave as if in a dream, stunned, awed and euphoric, all at once. What next? Who to tell? What can be gleaned from the data already gathered? Will the world ever be the same again? The story so far (which I admit involves some literary licence) does not demand any great leap of imagination. The basic scenario was well enough portrayed in the Hollywood movie Contact, in which Jodie Foster plays the role of the lucky, overawed astronomer. What is far less clear is the next step. What would follow from the successful detection of an alien radio signal? Most scientists agree that such a discovery would be disruptive and transformative in myriad ways. Even contemplating a signal received out of the blue raises many questions: How and

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by whom would it be evaluated? How would the public get to learn about it? Would there be social unrest, even panic? What would governments do? How would the world’s leaders react? Would the news be regarded with fear or wonderment? And in the longer term, what would it mean for our society, our sense of identity, our science, technology and religions? On top of these imponderables is the vexed issue of whether we should respond to the signal, by sending our own message to the aliens. Would that invite dire consequences, such as invasion by a fleet of wellarmed starships? Or would it promise deliverance for a possibly stricken species? There are no agreed answers to any of these questions. The narrative of Contact parted company with established science once the signal was received, and lurched off into the speculative realms of wormhole space travel and other dramatic themes. That was science fiction, deriving from the fertile imagination of the late Cornell University astronomer Carl Sagan, author of the book on which the film was based. In the real world, it is completely unclear what would follow the discovery that we are not alone in the universe. In 2001 the international Academy of Astronautics established a committee to address ‘what next?’ issues. Known as the SETI Post-Detection Taskgroup, its job is to prepare the ground in the event that SETI suddenly succeeds. The rationale is that once a signal from an alien source is confirmed, things would move too fast for the scientific community to deliberate wisely. I happen to be the current Chair of the SETI Post-Detection Taskgroup, and this unusual position has prompted me to give considerable thought to the subject of SETI in general, and post-detection in particular.

Is SETI stuck in a rut? I’ve been associated with SETI one way or another for most of my career, and have enormous admiration for the astronomers

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who operate the radio telescopes and analyse the data, as well as for the technical staff who design and build the equipment. I hope the eerie silence is indeed due to the fact that the search has been limited, and I am a strong supporter of the Allen Telescope Array. But I also think, for reasons I shall come to later, that there is only a very slender hope of receiving a message from the stars at this time, so alongside ‘traditional SETI’, of the sort pioneered by Frank Drake, we need to establish a much broader program of research, a search for general signatures of intelligence, wherever they may be imprinted in the physical universe. And that requires the resources of all the sciences, not just radio astronomy. There is, however, another factor that has to be addressed. By focusing on a very specific scenario – an alien civilisation beaming detectable so-called narrow-band (sharp-frequency) radio messages to Earth – traditional SETI has become stuck in something of a conceptual rut. Fifty years of silence is an excellent cue for us to enlarge our thinking about the subject. Crucially, we must free SETI from the shackles of anthropocentrism, which has hampered it from the very beginning. To help spur this process, I convened a special SETI workshop in February 2008 at Arizona State University’s Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, with the goal of fostering a lively exchange of ideas between mainstream SETI researchers and a handful of quirky out-of-the-box thinkers, including philosophers, science fiction writers and cosmologists. The upshot was a blueprint for ‘new SETI’. How could something as bold and visionary as SETI become conservative? A major part of the reason is the tendency of humans to extrapolate from their own experience. The very basis for SETI is, after all, an assumption that our civilisation is in some respects typical, and that there will be other Earths out there with flesh-and-blood sentient beings not too different from us, who will be anxious to communicate. Given that predicate,

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it is reasonable to take human nature and human society as a model for what an alien civilisation will be like – we don’t have much else to go on, after all. In the early days of SETI, when the basic strategy was being planned, there were a lot of questions along the lines of ‘What would we do in those circumstances?’ The result, inevitably, is an inbuilt bias towards anthropocentrism. Here is a classic example. SETI began with the realisation that radio telescopes have the power to beam signals across space. Therefore it’s possible that alien signals are coming our way. The image popularised by Carl Sagan was that of an alien civilisation directing a message at Earth in the form of narrow-band radio signals. The specifics soon fell into place: the message would be folded into a carder wave and transmitted from an antenna at a fixed frequency and with enough power to loom above naturally produced radio noise. That is the way terrestrial radio stations do it. It’s easy to detect narrow-band signals, once the receiving antenna has been tuned to the right frequency (and, in the case of radio telescopes, pointed in the right direction). There are many other ways to encode and transmit radio messages which require more sophisticated receiving procedures, but SETI astronomers assume that an alien civilisation anxious to attract our attention would adopt the simplest method appropriate to entry-level radio technology. Back in the 1960s, a major preoccupation among SETI researchers was deciding which particular frequency ET might choose, given that there are billions of possibilities. Not all radio frequencies penetrate Earth’s atmosphere effectively, so the hope was that the aliens would customise their signals for Earth-like planets by using a frequency that doesn’t get greatly attenuated by its passage down from space. But that still left a huge number of potential radio channels. It would be the supreme irony to turn a radio telescope on the right star but tune into the wrong fre-

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quency and miss the message. Researchers argued that the aliens would anticipate our dilemma and pick a ‘natural’ frequency – one likely to be known to all radio astronomers. A popular guess was 1420 MHz, the emission frequency for cold hydrogen gas. Radio astronomers are very familiar with this pervasive ‘song of hydrogen’, and it is in some sense a good choice. At any rate, that was the frequency Frank Drake picked for Project Ozma in 1960. Other astronomers suggested multiplying the hydrogen frequency by π, that number being what humans would take to be a ‘signature of intelligence’ because it enters into both geometry and the equations of fundamental physics, so would surely be familiar to any alien scientist. But there are other special numbers too, like exponential e and the square root of 2. In addition, there was a conundrum about whether the aliens would insert a correction to compensate for the motion of their planet and/ or our planet. Very soon, the list of possible ‘natural’ frequencies became depressingly long. However, this battle of the wavebands went away, because technology that enables radio astronomers to monitor millions and even billions of radio channels (typically between 1 and 10 Hz wide) simultaneously became available. As a result, not many SETI researchers worry these days about second-guessing the aliens’ choice of frequency. My point is that modest advances in human technology have led within just a few decades to a change in thinking about likely alien communication frequencies. There is a major lesson in this example. It is wise to view the situation through the eyes of the civilisation setting out to communicate with us, on the assumption that it has been around for a very long time – at least 1 million years, and maybe 100 million years or more. Although the aliens may well settle on radio as the medium (perhaps for our benefit), they can hardly be expected to discriminate between 1950s and 1980s levels of human technology: what are a few decades in a million years?

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Another case in point: in the 1960s, the laser came to be seen as a powerful alternative means of human communication, and very soon some SETI researchers began to argue that ET, being so much more advanced, would surely prefer to use this fancy tool rather than old-fashioned radio. As a result, optical SETI was born (and still flourishes): astronomers search for a signal in the form of very short-duration, high-intensity pulses of light that with suitable equipment can be distinguished from the overall much brighter but unvarying light of the parent star. Laser communication came less than a century after the invention of radio communication, so once again I ask, what does a century matter to a million-year-old civilisation? A greater degree of parochialism occurs when SETI gets influenced by human politics and even economics. One of the main unknowns is the longevity of a communicating civilisation. The challenge is to guess whether ET will be on the air for centuries, millennia or even longer. During the Cold War, many SETI proponents reasoned that the development of advanced radio communication would be paralleled by similar-level technological developments, such as nuclear weapons. Because our own society was at that time in grave danger of nuclear annihilation, it was fashionable to argue that alien technological civilisations likewise wouldn’t last long. They would have their own Cold War which, after a few decades, would turn hot, and knock them off the air. When the (terrestrial) Cold War ended, human political concerns shifted to the environment, and SETI thinking duly shifted with it. The hot-button issue now, in many people’s eyes, is no longer nuclear war, but sustainability. Transmitting powerful radio waves across the galaxy would require large-scale engineering and soak up a lot of energy. Surely an advanced alien civilisation would tailor its technology so as to minimise the environmental impact? Well, maybe. But that line of reasoning would have been received sceptically in the 1960s

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political atmosphere, and may well be regarded as irrelevant in another hundred years, when environmental problems may be replaced by other concerns. There is no reason to suppose that a million-year-old super-civilisation would have ‘a sustainability problem’. It might, of course, have some other problem, maybe one we couldn’t anticipate, or wouldn’t understand even if we were told. SETI is the quintessentially long-term project, and it is foolish to base too much of our search strategy on flavour-ofthe-month political fashion. Guessing the political priorities of an alien civilisation is futile. Equally futile is guessing alien economics. Take, for example, H.G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds, in which the Martians, saddled with an inferior planet, consider decamping to Earth. Wells portrays a creepy image of covetous aliens, technologically far ahead of humans, eyeing our planet with malice, ‘… across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us’. Wells wrote his story in the 1890s, at the height of the British Empire, when wealth and power were measured in acres of land, tons of coal and iron, and head of cattle. The richest men built railways and owned big ships, mined coal or copper or gold, and purchased vast tracts of grazing land. In short, wealth in Victorian times meant physical stuff. So it was natural to think of alien civilisations similarly valuing real estate and mineral resources, and making plans to spread across space in search of more once their own planet was mined out. Such was the prime motive of Wells’s Martians. However, barely a century later, the global economy had transformed out of all recognition. By the 1990s, Bill Gates was the new Rockefeller, making money not from ‘physical stuff ’ but from bits of information. Microsoft had more financial clout than most countries. With information age economics came information age SETI. Surely, it was

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reasoned, the aliens would not be so primitively rapacious as to scour the galaxy for iron ore, still less for gold or diamonds. An advanced extraterrestrial community would value information – that would be their currency, their source of wealth. Information and knowledge – those more noble incentives – would come to dominate the alien agenda. Lust for information may drive them to send out probes, not to acquire material, but to explore and observe and measure, and to compile a database, a veritable Encyclopedia Galactica. It seems reasonable enough today, but I wonder how the information argument will play out in the 2090s, when the economy may revolve around something that hasn’t yet been imagined, let alone invented. If human priorities can change so dramatically in a mere century, what hope have we of guessing the priorities of a civilisation that may have enjoyed a million or more years of economic development? The same general criticism can be levelled at most theorising about what an alien civilisation would be like and how its members would behave. It’s true that the history of human civilisation gives a clue, and certain general principles might apply to all intelligent life. The problem is, we have only one sample of life, one sample of advanced intelligence, and one sample of high technology. It is really hard to untangle the features that may be special to our planet from any general principles about the emergence of life and intelligence in the universe. In these circumstances there is an inevitable temptation to fall back on analogy with humanity when trying to second-guess ET. But that is almost certainly fallacious. Asking what we would do is largely irrelevant. The narrow focus and parochialism inherent in traditional SETI has not been lost on Frank Drake: Our signals of today are very different from the signals of 40 years ago, which we then felt were perfect models of what might be radiated from other worlds of any state of

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advancement. We were wrong. If technology can change that much in 40 years, how much might it change in thousands or millions of years?

And that’s it in a nutshell. However, this clear acknowledgement by the founder of traditional SETI has yet to translate into radical new approaches on the research front. In my opinion, the way forward is to stop viewing alien motives and activities through human eyes. Thinking about SETI requires us to abandon all our presuppositions about the nature of life, mind, civilisation, technology and community destiny. In short, it means thinking the unthinkable.

f Messages p. 79 Isolation p. 50 Searching p. 68

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Acknowledgments

‘Bad hotel’ by Anna Funder: published in The Monthly © 2010 Anna Funder ‘Science without a capital S’ by Robyn Williams: published in Griffith REVIEW ‘The trouble with genes’ by Elizabeth Finkel: published in COSMOS © 2010 COSMOS magazine ‘There is no mercury in vaccines’ by Deb Hodgkin: published in Science@home <science-at-home.org> ‘Is your brain making you fat?’ by Michael Cowley: published on ABC Science <www.abc.net.au/science> ‘It’s time to talk’ by Kate Legge: published in The Weekend Australian Magazine ‘To save a species’ by Deborah Smith: published in the Sydney Morning Herald ‘You should probably just move oceans, male Gulf pipefish’ by Becky Crew: published in Save Your Breath for Running Ponies ‘Birth of a killer’ by Sonia Shah: published in Fever: How Malaria has Ruled Mankind for 500,000 Years (Allen & Unwin, 2010) ‘Lousy science’ by Christine Kenneally: published in The Monthly ‘A fresh look at Earth’ by Tim Flannery: published in Here on

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Acknowledgments

Earth: An Argument for Hope (Text Publishing Australia, 2010) © Tim Flannery ‘How to keep the river flowing’ by Jessica Weir: published in New Matilda ‘Blame it on the Stones’ by Rob Brooks: published in Sex, Genes and Rock ‘n’ Roll: How Evolution has Shaped the Modern World (NewSouth, 2011) ‘In the age of fishes’ by Nyssa Skilton: published in The Canberra Times ‘Tiger by the tail’ by Robert Reid: published in Shark!: Killer Tales from the Dangerous Depths (Allen & Unwin, 2010) ‘Gone viral’ by Frank Bowden: published in Gone Viral: The Germs that Share our Lives (NewSouth, 2011) ‘Skin feeders’ by Katherine Fleming: published in Australian Geographic, June 2010 <www.australiangeographic.com. au> ‘Once were dinosaurs’ by John Pickrell: published in COSMOS © 2010 COSMOS magazine ‘Australian floods: Why were we so surprised?’ by Germaine Greer: published in The Guardian ‘No escaping the science’ by Clive Hamilton: published in Requiem for a Species: Why we resist the truth about climate change (Allen & Unwin, 2010) ‘How aqua regia saved Nobel Prize medals from the Nazis’ by Captain Skellett: published in A Schooner of Science <www. aschoonerofscience.com> ‘Extremes of sound’ by Bryan Gaensler: published in Extreme Cosmos (NewSouth, 2011) ‘String theory ties us in knots’ by Marcelo Gleiser: published on ABC Science <www.abc.net.au/science/> ‘Deepak Chopra: Misunderstanding physics since he willed himself into existence’ by Richard Hughes: published in Divisible by Pi <www.divisiblebypi.com>

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‘Twinkling stars’ by Karl Kruszelnicki: edited extract from Karl Kruszelnicki, Curious & Curiouser (Pan Macmillan, 2010) ‘Flesh and stardust’ by Richard King: abridged version of a piece first published in Meanjin ‘Is anybody out there?’ by Paul Davies: published in The Eerie Silence: Are We Alone in the Universe? (Allen Lane, 2010)

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The Best Australian Science Writing 2011

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011

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