The Fly Trap (Book Review)

     The Fly Trap is a modern creative novel: one part biography, a second part history of entomology, a third scientific explanation, with rapture at flies mixed throughout. I’ve been reading Moby-Dick recently, and the similarities are striking. There’s the same tendency to switch themes between paragraphs and chapters, to weave the scientific, historical, and biographical together, and to embiggen fact when necessary. But what draws the entomologist in is Fredrik Sjöberg’s replacement of Melville’s whales with flies and the hope that the author will do the subject of our work and life passions the justice they deserve. How often is any particular family of insects besides butterflies made the subject of literature?

     Sjöberg’s centerpiece is the two-winged fly family Syrphidae, more commonly known as “hover flies” or “flower flies”, names which refer to incredible flight capabilities and the tendency to be nectar feeders. They are commonly yellow and black mimics of bees and wasps. Unlike the animals they’re mimicking they have no stingers to deter predators, so they avoid predation by looking like something dangerous. Sjöberg peppers his chapters with vignettes about individual species, including everything from taxonomic and regional history, physical and ecological diagnoses, and personal anecdotes. My favorite is the sudden “invasion” of Eristalis smilis which overtook the Swedish countryside, contrasted with Doros, of which there are only occasional sightings and elaborate rumors.

     The other subjects are “islands”, whether those be Sjöberg’s home island of Runmarö or a tree stump in a recent clear-cut. “Islands are generalizations of a kind”, he writes. “And where there are no islands, we have to invent them. If only for the fun of it.” He cites the loneliness and isolation of islands both positive and negative. Islands are perfect ground for the cataloger, sometimes disparaged as “buttonologist”, who provides a complimentary and more detailed worldview for “mapmakers”. 

“But the person who makes maps can never include everything in his picture of reality, which remains a simplification no matter what scale he chooses. Both attempt to capture something and to preserve it.” 

I particularly enjoyed his description of the Fly Tree, an enormous, 500 year old black poplar that was an island ecosystem onto itself. These species descriptions and descriptions of “islands”, are the stepping stones on which Sjöberg’s stories rest. 

     Yes, stories. There are actually two stories here, two interwoven biographies. One is of the author’s work with hover flies. The other biography is of the heroic, larger than life Rene Malaise, who sits in sharp contrast to the author. Malaise was a great explorer, eponymous trap inventor, and collector abroad, especially in eastern Russia and Southeast Asia. Sjöberg tries to avoid all collecting and exploration beyond his small island in the Baltic Sea. He says of the tropics, “Tropical nights can build into tremendous explosions of downright Cambro-Silurian cacophony when a thunderstorm starts or cicadas celebrate their orgies in the treetops. They’re magnificent, but no more than that. The indescribable sound of the Madagascar nightjar is worth the entire trip, but in the end it is merely interesting and exciting and fun to tell people about later.” Of the Congo River basin, “What an adventure! What stories I would tell! About freedom! But it didn’t happen. I never managed to say much more than that the forests were vast and the river as broad as Kalmar Sound. And that I’d been there.” Yet he idolizes Malaise and his travels, to the point where he starts a collection of Malaise-related ephemeralia. This ends ironically with an expensive purchase of a painting once belonging to Malaise. The author, so adverse to crazed collecting, has become a buttonologist. But Sjöberg stays to his island, claming glorious isolation and “slowness” allow him an illusion of control over these impulses.

     One of The Fly Trap’s most overreaching themes is what Eliezer Yudkowsky calls “The Virtue of Narrowness”. Sjöberg’s collection only contains the 202 species of hoverflies (plus one) found thus far on Runmarö island. He feels he must justify his narrowness, so he writes that it’s purely for pleasure. No, it’s because he loves the D.H. Lawrence style of isolation provided by islands. No, it’s a sort of “buttonology”, a collecting disorder, which in his case is benign. No, it’s an attempt to slow down in our fast-paced world. He doesn’t beg the reader to accept his reasons for collecting and observing his island’s hover flies as scientific. Even when he claims his study allows him to “read nature’s language”, the result is for enjoyment. Maybe he feels he can’t explain the usefulness of this small study on his small island to broader natural history, not even to a lay reader, but I don’t think he needs to. The Virtue of Narrowness is the precision and accuracy of your knowledge. It’s enough to only explain hover flies on Runmarö, and Sjöberg knows it, but he still claims “hobby” because it’s not his “real” job.

     True, he does romanticize his narrowness whenever possible. But I enjoy some romanticized narrowness. In my favorite poem by the midwestern American Tom Montag, “The Farmer’s Manifesto”, the farmer says of his father, “He had no /ideas but the things which /his hands could touch, or /those his eyes could find /at great distance—a glint /of sun off farmhouse windows. /Or close at hand, beneath /his feet. What he could /catch as breath; wind would /carry. He knew those weeds.”  Romanticized or not, that sort of narrowness holds an incredible depth of knowledge, what Montag could only name as “strange /dark madness, some amazing avalanche /of wolves, lakes, stars, tongues” and the ability to “hear corn grow in summer; /can hide your face in /the curving surface of sky; /examine a potato in light /so special you know something /flies back at you”. This is the sort of knowledge that comes from doing the same thing repeatedly over a small stretch of world and small number of subjects until they become windows. What seems like buttonology is deep expertise.

     I don’t mean to say that The Fly Trap is perfection or free from cliche. It belongs firmly within a genre of creative natural history writing first made popular in the 19th century, a Euro-centric and primarily masculine genre written by men for men and boys. Women are largely incidental to the story and are mentioned mostly as love interests or as props. His wife features prominently at the end of the first chapter, but only as the nameless “girl who sat in the audience one evening”. Of professional meetings, he says, “Normally no women take part at all. And the few who do happen to show up are usually the better halves of the biggest crackpots, wives who could easily pass as personal assistance from a psychiatric open ward. Well, maybe that’s unfair. But the fact is that unattached women could hardly find a better hunting ground than entomological societies. Unusual men, no competition. Just a suggestion.” Does that mean the only reason for women to attend meetings is to pick up men? Even the preface quote ends with the condescending line, “Me, I just concern myself with flies — a much greater theme than men, though maybe not greater than women.” The only exceptions are the short biographical sketches of the incredible, possibly lesbian Esther Blenda Nordström, a writer, explorer, and ethnologist who briefly married Malaise and traveled with him to Asia. Unfortunately, her story was abandoned when Sjöberg realized Malaise hadn’t named a species after her, and therefore Malaise’s “love” for her couldn’t be verified (unlike for Ebba Soederhall). I could have read an entire book about Nordström and her travels. Fortunately she wrote several. Unfortunately, I don't read Swedish (but maybe you do).

     The Euro-centrism is more forgivable. The Fly Trap was originally written and released in Swedish. The intended audience was Swedes, the setting was (mostly) Sweden, and Sjöberg is Swedish himself. The English translation came ten years later, so it should be read as a Swedish novelslashbiographyslashcreative-nonfiction and shouldn’t be taken as worldly. Especially since Sjöberg repeatedly admits his own non-worldliness.

      I realize I haven’t said very much about flies in this review. Fact is, if you’re still reading this and you haven’t already read The Fly Trap, you probably already have some interest in flies and will be delighted as I was of the hover fly natural history in this book. There isn’t anything to criticize about those descriptions except to say that they’re wonderful and I wish there was more of them. I recommend The Fly Trap for entomologists and non-entomologists alike.

 Sjöberg, F. 2014. The Fly Trap [English translation, Thomas Teal], Pantheon Books, NY. Amazon

Canfield - Field Notes on Science and Nature

Just what is the best way to record and organize my research notes? I've long been interested in answering this question. On the first day of my master's degree, I started a bound notebook (I love the squared, softcover Moleskine notebooks), and used it for caddisfly-exclusive notes. In particular, the notebook filled with sketches, observations, and thoughts pertaining to my work on the genus Cheumatopsyche. When I started my PhD program, I did the same for my tachinid research. I also keep a Grinnel-style triad of field journal, catalog, and species accounts for any field work and dragonfly observations. These are less often used, as I spend most of my time in the lab looking at dead specimens under the microscope.

I had been meaning to read Field Notes on Science and Nature for several years now, and finally just got around to it. The book is a mixed collection of biologists, anthropologists, and geologists, writing about their methods of taking notes in the field (whatever "the field" might be). The individual chapters are accompanied by photographs of the actual field notes, so you get both the text explanation of methods as well as a visual example. The primary methods of these researchers range from the above mentioned Grinnel system, to more informal collections of notes and drawings, to careful logs of stratigraphy, to the completely electronic recording system of insect taxonomist Piotr Nasrecki.

However, the overall feel is less that of a textbook on field work and more artbook-slash-nature journal. Most of the chapter authors supply prose accounts of exciting field observations, particularly those working with large mammals. And the journals in themselves are both art and historical artifacts; they carry information, but are also pleasant to look at.

One theme stretching through the work that seemed most important to me was that "the field" is not necessarily out in nature. It can be, in many people's research, simply in the presence of potentially living specimens. For me, viewing specimens at the microscope is "the field", and the notebook in which I record my observations is my "field journal". Another point many authors made was that observations should be recorded as soon as possible, in a permanent method which other people can use in the future. Who knows what piece of information may be useful?

I appreciated these and other suggestions on design and maintinance of field notes, including Jenny Keller's heuristic for drawing biological specimens in the chapter "Why Sketch?". I have been illustrating genitalia for some time now, but I have no formal art training, so some of her methods were completely unknown to me.

I recommend this book for anyone who does natural history research, because, even if you have already found your perfect method, you will appreciate the diversity of approaches to keeping notes in the field.

Book Review: Micro

(Warning: The following is filled with spoilers.)

I have a long history with Michael Crichton. When I was in second grade, I read Jurassic Park and loved it (though the film still terrified me a year later).  He had a knack for taking unbelievable future tech and plopping it down in the here and now, and somehow it turned out believable. In great part this was due to his research and attention to detail, and to his memorable characters. Ian Malcom, for example, one of the doomed protagonists of Jurassic Park, was brought back to life for The Lost World despite dying mid exposition in the original. And, ultimately, the villains seldom turned out to be truly evil. They were more often victims of greed or folly. John Hammond, for example, was a doting grandfather and otherwise generally benign eccentric who stood a little high on the shoulders of giants, and ended up falling hard for it (though his death was redacted in the film version). It's true that Crichton loved to write morality tales about human folly, whether that be in harnessing nature for profit (Next, Jurassic Park, The Lost World), technological fallibility (Timeline, Prey), the limits of human mental ability when faced with the unknown (Sphere, Congo), or simply pointing out our overall vulnerability as a species (Andromeda Strain). But since I came to expect morality tales as part and parcel of the Crichton enterprise, and since the novels were always so well written and well premised, the moral aspect was rendered almost mythical. Take Jurassic Park, again. The morality tale was that these humans expected they could control natural processes, that they would have the wisdom to make that step despite lacking total understanding. It's a modern retelling of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods. This simplified moral dilemma makes a better story. So, the moral aspect never really bothered me.

Well, I shouldn't say never. Among the many Crichton novels there was one stinker, State of Fear, the /only/ one I was unable to finish. It was overall a poorly researched work with one too many author avatars, a platform for Crichton's opinions on global climate change. I questioned his sanity after that one, though he did go on to write Next which was, if not as good as Timeline, at least was better than State of Fear. Fans of Crichton note a decline in quality near the end of his life, Next and Prey not nearly as memorable as Andromeda Strain and Congo.

When I heard recently that his last novel, part finished at the time of his death, had just been published with the help of Richard Preston, I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt. Richard Preston (not to be confused with his brother, Douglas Preston, also a great writer) is the author of The Hot Zone, a non-fiction collection of stories about the origins and discoveries of several different types of hemorrhagic fevers, including Ebola virus. So I knew that he could handle stories with a heavy scientific component, and was generally optimistic about this final Crichton novel, Micro.

Simply, the premise is a combination of harnessing nature for profit paired with technological fallibility, which brings to light human vulnerability in primal ways. A company based in Honolulu, Hawai'i, has developed high strength tensor magnetic field technology, which surprisingly has the ability to shrink living and non-living things down to microscopic size. This is the equivalent phlebotinum to Jurassic Park's cloning dinosaur DNA. You may be thinking "remake of Honey I Shrunk the Kids", but unlike that comedic plot device, the company starts shrinking down people to do micro-bioprospecting. Thus leading to a massive outpouring of new research, including basic natural history work all the way to medical applications. Of course, muckety muck, the CEO is a greedy sociopath, and along with all this great stuff the company is making micro-scale assassination drones (you knew it couldn't be that simple), and people are getting offed. There's also this pesky issue of people dying from "micro-bends" after spending too much time shrunk, with an ongoing investigation of people who "disappeared" into the micro world. Did I mention the protagonists are all biology graduate students, including entomologists? Did I mention, that the setting is O'ahu, mainly in the Manoa Valley and the slopes of Tantalus? I've been there, twice, and while species poor (it's fiction so tweaking the diversity is alright) is a great location. So, overall, the wild yet interesting premise of biology graduate students ending up trapped in the world of insects, in Hawai'i, with loads of insect natural history thrown in...that sounds like the set up to my favorite Crichton novel.

Unfortunately, what started with such a beautiful premise and could have had me gripped to a chair until I turned the last page, did not live up to my expectations. And the failure wasn't the premise but execution: one-dimensional characters that felt like cardboard, lengthy out-of place expositions (which sometimes had wrong information!), rushed writing, gory death scenes, one of those "boy gets the girl" stereotypical endings; in short, mediocre and disappointing.

Part of what makes the earlier Crichton books so believable is his ability to take these wild ideas and run with them, and at the same time get other basic details right. Cloning Velociraptor DNA from 65+ million year old amber trapped mosquitoes and inserting them into ostrich eggs may have been completely unbelievable, but it worked because he used the best information we had about dinosaur biology and ecology at the time. I was able to suspend disbelief because those creatures actually looked and acted like what I read by Robert Bakker and Jack Horner. And insects are that much easier to get right since they are still around, and there is copious literature about insect morphology, physiology, behavior, etc. Maybe it's just a pet peeve of mine, but when I'm trying to read a novel and the author gets one of the basics of insect physiology wrong not once but twice, and in ways important to the plot at the time, I start to cringe.

There were several instances of this, but the worst was the "breathing". For those of you not familiar, insects do not inhale and exhale as we do. They have a series of tubes called tracheae running from openings (spiracles) on the insect cuticle to deep inside the body cavity, narrowing as they go. Oxygen enters the air in these tubes by passive diffusion down gradient, and the cells pick this oxygen up at the narrowest parts (the tracheoles), which are filled with fluid. Carbon dioxide, the waste product of respiration, takes a different path; it passes out into the fluid filled cavity of the insect and dissolves in the hemolymph, the "blood" of the insect. Over time it dissipates out through the cuticle. As you can see, there's no breathing, no inhaling and exhaling, involved. Insects do ventilate at times, rapidly flexing and relaxing the abdomen, and there are a small number of insects that have discontinuous gas exchange, but never is this like vertebrate respiration. The basics of how insects respire is not some esoteric tidbit. It's often taught in undergrad biology 101 courses. So when either Crichton or Preston (whoever wrote these passages) get such a basic fact of insect physiology wrong, when they say the characters can hear the hissing of air entering and exiting the spiracles, slowing as the insect dies or increasing as it gets excited, I completely loose my suspension of disbelief. [This section is embarresingly off base. See http://www.sciencemag.org/content/299/5606/558 for work on insect active respiration. It's clear that probably most insects respire with aid of tracheole compression and dialation, at least in the head and thorax. This is what should be taught in schools, not passive diffusion. I've been served.]

The same is true of when characters, especially the protagonists, act like stereotypes and do it robotically. Take the introduction of our intrepid grad students. Our current main character, Peter (later a sacrificial lamb), walks around his lab talking to his fellow lab mates, asking them what they are doing. Now, of course, he supposedly knows what they are working on, being in the same lab with them day in and out, going to lab meetings, talking in free time, etc. Therefore, their answers should be just enough information to satisfy our curiosity about the characters, while at the same time not make Peter look like a completely unaware idiot. What we get instead is a lengthy exposition out of each of the lab mate's mouths, with copious jargon spoken in straight monotone, which is how all the later expositions sounded. Or at least I thought of it as monotone, because for most of the book the emotional status of each character feels like a poorly acted melodramatic soap. Heres an example from Peter's brother Eric (who didn't actually die at the beginning; spoilers!) after he finds out about Peter's death.

"Eric gasped as if he'd been punched. "No," he said. He closed his eyes. "No," he said again. he made a fist and slammed it on the dresser. "No!" He turned around and pounded the bed with both fists, and picked up a chair and threw it against the wall, and sand down on the bed and buried his face in his hands. "Peter...oh, Peter...God damn you Drake [ed.: the sociopathic CEO]...God damn you." [ellipses not mine]  --pg. 363

At other times, particularly following the gruesome, gory deaths of their lab mates at the hand of an arthropod, they seem to show no reaction at all. But it's a survival situation, you may exclaim, surely they should keep the hell going! Except, these aren't survival experts. These aren't Alan Grant and Ellie Sadler, who spent years in the badlands before heading into Jurassic Park. These are /grad students/ for goodness sakes! The most wildlands survival experience they've had is one of them once went to Puerto Rico on a trip , and another was a rape victim. I'm not trying to play down the horrors of rape, but it's hardly sufficient to prepare her for seeing an acquaintance torn in half by big headed ants the size of dogs.

Did I mention the gore? It's definitely overplayed in this one. I recall the death of John Hammond in Jurassic Park, who fell down the hill and got chomped by a herd of chicken sized dinosaurs. But the death and gore was carefully spliced out. You /knew/ he got eaten, but it was implied, not explicit. The amount of gore in Micro reminds me of the film Final Destination 5. My best friend and I decided it would be funny to watch, remembering the "spooky wind" stuff of the prequels. But we stopped halfway through because the goryness of the death scenes was completely unnecessary and over the top. It was frankly disgusting, which is about how I felt when one of the shrunk-down stooges out to get the protagonists gets "ebola-fied" by a spider. Preston used his experience to write it, I'm sure, and it was probably all correct, yet still completely unnecessary and a gigantic turn off.

I was going to expand on the stereotypes that each of the protagonists played up until their unfortunate demises, but I just realized that this is more typical of Crichton's mold. The difference is that Alan Grant made a believable conservative, workaholic paleontologist, while Danny (from Micro) was an unbelievable post-modernist, tweed wearing Haaaavard boy. The same with Rick the ethnobotanist environmentalist hippy. Strawmen abound.

Which brings me to the romantic element. Out of the blue, Rick (the environmentalist hippy) and Karen (the arachnologist rape victim) fall for each other in the midst of the carnage, and as the only survivors end up sitting on the beach together at the end like something out of a Clive Cussler novel. This nearly sappy ending didn't happen in any other Crichton novel I can remember (or maybe I remember poorly). Either Crichton has fallen a long way, or Preston really pushed the lowest common denominator. Even in Jurassic Park, where is was implied that Alan and Ellie were in a relationship throughout, there was no happy end scene. There was a epilogue scene at a hotel, following the escape from Isla Nublar, but it was played cool.

And then there's the villain, Vincent Drake, the sociopathic CEO who can't hide his greed. Yes, I know, I've called him that at least three times since the start of this review, but that is literally the total depth of his character. As soon as Peter gets an idea that his brother might have been murdered, Drake shrinks ALL the grad students down and tries to murder them all in succession, including one of his own employees. And then tries to murder them again. And a third time. This Dr. Evil will not negotiate. Which makes him completely unbelievable as a businessman and villain. Plus, part of the enjoyment in most Crichton villains is that they are at least partially sympathetic. When Drake died to his own micromachines it was more like putting down a rabies infected dog than a triumph.

The only two interesting characters in the book were the detective Dan Watanabe, and the microed employee who went native, Dan Rourke. But unfortunately only one of those had any airtime. The latter is killed off shortly after we meet him. Even Watanabe is a generously stereotyped Hawaiian, enjoying his spam sushi, using Hawaiian terms, but at least he doesn't feel like a cardboard cutout like the rest of the cast.

Overall, it took me two months to finish Micro, setting it down when I became disinterested and picking it back up again when I knew I had to finish, if only to return the book and write this review. And though the length was no shorter than Jurassic Park (421 versus 420 pages), the prose felt particularly rushed. It's almost as if Preston and The John Michael Crichton Trust were trying to get this out as quickly as possible. If that's the case, Micro suffered for it. I certainly suffered through it, despite my entomological inclinations. It's not clear who to blame for it, Crichton or Preston, since we have no indication how much was written at the time of Michael's death. The introduction was left unfinished. So I blame no one, or maybe just myself for setting my hopes too high.

Book Review: Foundations of Systematics and Biogeography.

Ebach and Williams "new" book has been out for several years now, and while Platnick, Brower, and Amorim previously weighed in, none of these are as critical and scathing as Ferris's recent review in Cladistics.

The book does, though, contain things we did not know—indeed, there are things here that no one has ever known. Among these revelations are that cephalaspids are placoderms; that Haeckel was responsible for grouping by overall similarity whereas Cuvier and Huxley had nothing to do with it; that Sokal and Sneath (1963) were primarily interested in phylogeny; that Nelson never accepted transformation; that Hennig used only congruent characters, because Sokal and Sneath said so; that paraphyly has no connection with symplesiomorphy; that DNA sequences have no hierarchic structure—unless used by Patterson; that parsimony is limited to binary characters, is closely linked to grouping by overall similarity, and does not draw conclusions of homoplasy; that reversals do not really happen and would be plesiomorphies if they did; that all un3ts data are phenetic—unless used by Patterson; that 3ta and ppa are not methods, being inspection of the data instead; that transformation is a myth; and that transformation is nonetheless distortion. A reader would have to be rather poorly informed to fall for this nonsense, which is to say that the book has obviously been designed to victimize just such readers. Ignorance is strength. This brings us back to Platnick's (2009, p. 281) central comment:

It should be especially useful for students.

Like Williams and Ebach, he has realized that tricking the least experienced students is the only chance that 3ta has left. No doubt publishers relish such recommendations. If Platnick’s endorsement were believed, Springer would get their $90 a head regardless of the damage done to students.

Ouch.

I haven't yet had time to purchase a copy and read it, so I can't really weigh in from my perspective. Generally, I trust the evidence Ferris presents in his review. The main conflict centers around the use of three taxa analysis (3ta), and whether or not it is a useful method for phylogenetic inference. This old method takes three taxa from a set to be analyzed, decides which two are more closely related to each other than to the third, and puts them back into the mix, rinse, repeat, until all relationships are resolved. This seems to me to be a wholly inefficient way of parsimoniously finding a summary of relationships, and according to Ferris's review, may be more likely to create paraphyletic groupings than path finding the shortest trees by heuristics (approximation) and collapsing to a consensus. Consider if you had 30 species to search, which is millions of combinations. This is not the same as simply trying to resolve the relationship between three taxa alone. The simplicity of such an arangement means there are only three hypotheses (topologies), of which one is correct. An example would be simply trying to find the relationship of Ephemeroptera, Odonata and Neoptera. Relationships within each of those groups or outside are irrelevant to the question: are Ephemeroptera and Odonata more closely related to each other than either is to the Neoptera? Another issue I find is the emphasis that a so called "reversal" of a character could never be considered a synapomorphy. To which I ask, at what level?

Farris's comments makes the whole of Foundations seem to be a strange reactionary piece against traditional pattern cladistics, whereas traditional pattern cladistics is seen as reactionary by many molecular biologists today. I am not saying I'm going to remove Urhomology from my blogroll; I still value many of the statements Ebach and Williams have made there. It was while reading through the backposts I was inspired to write the statement "Homology is the key to the heart of biology", which continues to be a motto for me in regards to the importance of homology (synapomorphy) in figuring out the history of life and the pattern of evolution. I appreciate their rejection of paraphyly and their use of the term phylophenetics when discussing molecular phylogenetics as it is done currently. Even if the authors dwell on false or bad premises it does not carry that those ideas could not be instrumentally true in regards to the right premises.

When I finally purchase and read Foundations of Systematics and Biogeography, I'll let you know if my opinions change.

Book Review: Naming Nature.

My graduate adviser recently loaned me a copy of Carol Yoon's Naming Nature: the clash between science and instinct. Booklist's review stated it's "impossible to put down", which I found to be the case. I finished Naming Nature in one evening, finding it simultaneously inspiring and infuriating, and therefore deeply engaging. The next day I suggested it to all of my colleagues, calling it the best popular science book on systematics ever written.

Yoon's main premise is there exists an innate human tendency to order and classify the natural world in distinct and evolutionarily conserved categories. She calls this the umwelt (prouounced oom-velt), from the german word meaning "the environment" or "the surrounding world". Psychologists use this term to refer to the collective phenomenon in the environment capable of effecting an organism or individual. In ecology it has been used to refer to phenomenon that individuals within a particular species are able to recognize. Yoon suggests there is an umwelt for every species, and that the human umwelt consists of a set of conserved categories and a instinctual need to classify the natural world in consistent ways. The evidence she uses to support the concept is varied but intuitive. I finally now have a word to put on this concept which has been floating around my head for several years, which was as I said, inspiring.

However, as I continued to read, I became increasingly frustrated with her conclusions. The human umwelt is very local in time and space, applying to what an individual sees on a daily basis and qualified by what matters most in terms of survival or aesthetics. This is in contrast to the deeply non-local scientific understanding of life, which extends across the entire planet and backwards in time billions of years. Humans are not generally prepared to drop their biologically and culturally grounded categories for something much more immense, so there is a conflict. Yoon's conclusion is that scientific discoveries (including progress in systematics from Linnaeus to evolutionary taxonomy all the way to Cladistics) have alienated humans from their own umwelten, and her solution is to return to the classic categories, going as so far as to call a whale a fish in the final chapter of the book. All the while she complains about how those nasty cladists (myself included) have "killed the fish", "Fish" not being a monophyletic taxon including a common ancestor and all descendents, therefore invalid as a taxonomic grouping under the rules of Cladistics. Yoon claims that our new categories have made people alienated and apathetic, and therefore caused the extinction of many species.

After providing this exquisite description of the human umwelt as revealed by science, this was all so backwards. Modern systematics through cladistics has added so much to our understanding of Life and our own evolutionary heritage. The many species we know of today were only revealed by the very methods that Yoon claims to be the cause of their demise. And it's very clear that we haven't lost our abilities or we would be as lost as the brain damaged people she describes who cannot tell a lion from a raven. Even those systematists which work with molecules still retain this capacity, although their skills are not as strong as the classic morphological systematist. It seems her ire is misplaced.

The conclusion I have come to is very different. The human umwelt seems indeed to exist, and is conflict with science in it's classic form and categories. However, this conflict is not irreconcilable, nor is it ultimately the cause of species extinctions or human apathy. There are many other causes for these things, which are the subject of an entirely different discussion. The route to reconciliation is retraining of the umwelt to include evolutionarily real categories, which takes great time and effort but is entirely doable. The umwelt consists of a series of gestalten (singular: gestalt; German for "shape or form") which are the snapshots that allow immediate sensory identification of a living thing. Changing of the umwelt consists of training ones gestaltenspeicher ("gestalt-memory") until the categories fall in line with science.

And from personal experience, I can say that I understand and accept these modern categories and do not feel any alienation from the natural world. In fact, my understanding has brought me closer to life. As Eliezer Yudowsky the AI researcher and rationalist has stated on several occasions, "If we cannot take joy in the merely real, our lives will be empty indeed". I strongly suggest reading Yoon's book for the bits about umwalt and some insight into the history of systematics, but not to take her conclusions to heart. Instead, embrace the evolutionary understanding of life and train your own gestaltenspeicher; such things bring so much more joy than any foolish return to ignorance might grant over the short term.

Naming Nature at Amazon.com

More on umwelt from a biosemiotics perspective

Book Review: Darwin and the Barnacle.

Several years ago I attended a discussion class reading On the Origin of Species, first edition. Like most biologists, I had never read the book (though thankfully more biologists have read it than the ICZN), and it was very enlightening to study the entire document as a group, chapter by chapter, and discuss the contents both in relation to science in the mid 1800s and today.

One of the little tidbits I learned about Charles during that class was his years of work on barnacles. He spent ten years of his life, prior to the publication of On the Origin of Species, studying barnacles just so he could place a single strange species into context. And at the time this seemed quite incredible, much like being told that George Washington cut down the cherry tree or Kerry Mullis discovered PCR during an acid trip. It was a historical myth, maybe true, a little factoid, a morsel, etc.

Rebecca Stott takes this morsel and explodes it into a full blown thanksgiving feast with a 20 lb. turkey and loads of mashed potatoes. She begins with Darwn's childhood experiences with marine invertebrates and works her way up to the discovery of what he called "Mr. Arthrobalanus" on a beach in Chile. What started as a 6 month project became a 10 year task, during which he published 4 large volumes on all known extinct and extant barnacles. Stott serves this through the gravy of interpretive biography, and while she is not a biologist she handles the biology quite nicely. Most people who try to tackle writing about Darwin screw it up by completely misunderstanding On the Origin, littering the text with references to "survival of the fittest", and other spoonfuls much like finding your piece of turkey is nothing but boney bits, or your cranberry sauce is full of seeds. Thankfully she had a full team of Darwin specialists aiding her research. There was only once I felt she mishandled the theory, and it was quickly forgotten with the tastiness of the rest.

Darwin and the Barnacle had me sitting up in bed late at night to finish it. This is the tale of what Darwin did BEFORE he published his main course. It is not dry in the least. It's the moist bird you had the pleasure of sharing with family last Thursday (I hope).

http://www.amazon.com/Darwin-Barnacle-Spectacular-Scientific-Breakthrough/dp/0393057453


Also, I'm all out of Thanksgiving puns.

Review: Principles of Insect Morphology

RE Snodgrass first published Principles of Insect Morphology in 1935. Several reprints and 70 years later, this text still is useful and interesting for a student of entomology, and is a wonderful reference for any entomologist to have. Yes, it does not have the molecular information that one would find in more recent works such as Chapman's Insects: Structure and Function. At one point Snodgrass refers to the germ cells as "the carriers of inheritance, whatever that may be". Modern understanding of inheritance through DNA was not discovered until the middle part of the 20th century.

However, the drawings are excellent, and our understanding of basic structures of the insects such as the general body plan, the sclerites, muscles, wings, digestive tract, etc, have not changed much since this book was published. The writing and explanation of the figures is also excellent, and Snodgrass' hypotheses for the evolution of the insect ground plan are still in use today.

Snodgrass was a very meticulous, ordered and organized character. His daily habits were regular, he would fill his coffee cup to the same exact line every day at the same time and walk the same 30 some steps down the hallway to his office. This understanding of order and attention to detail shows very well in his drawings. His particular style of work was to reduce figures to the smallest necessary number of lines to convey proper understanding of structures. Those of you who have worked in biology labs before understand that too much detail in a reference figure obscures understanding of the position and structure of the very parts which you are using as reference. By reducing lines, Snodgrass effectively conveyed the exact message he wished to with his drawings, rather than putting us in awe of his artistic work and scrambling to understand what goes where.
Above: An example of Snodgrass' drawing style. Note the lack of stipling except to differentiate membrane from sclerotized regions.


Principles of Insect Morphology is a book every entomologist should have, as a reference text, and simply for the pleasure of its excellence. It is as useful now as it was 70 years ago.

Amazon.com link for Principles of Insect Morphology

Tapes of three lectures by RE Snodgrass with transcripts and drawings