A paper published in the latest issue of PLoS Medicine quantifies what most of us already know – that U.S. journalists are doing a poor job of accurately reporting on science, particularly in the field of medicine. The PLoS study was carried out by Gary Schwitzer, a journalism professor at the University of Minnesota. Schwitzer established HealthNewsReview.org, a website that publishes reviews of medical new stories, two years ago based on similar sites in Australia and Canada. The study that he’s published in PLoS reports the results of two years of analysis of the mainstream media’s treatment of health news. Schwitzer’s group monitors science news by the biggest newspapers in the U.S. and watch the morning and evening news programs of the three major networks on a daily basis. (If you think you’re job sucks, imagine if you had to watch all three morning shows every single day. Good god.) The researchers then assign a rating based on how well the story covers a number of criteria.

Even without Fox to skew the stats, the results are shocking yet unsurprising. Schwitzer claims that 62 – 77% of stories failed to adequately address costs, harms, benefits, the quality of the evidence and the existence of other options when covering health care products or procedures. The issue that was ignored most often by the media was cost of products and procedures. In a country in which 16% of the GDP is spent on health care, only one quarter of new stories addressed the minor issue of the cost of the technique they were discussing. Well done. Less than a third of news stories addressed issues such as the benefits or harms of products or the quality of the evidence reported by the primary source. For me, however, the most disturbing statistics were that nearly 40% of news reports failed to reveal that one of the “experts” that were cited had a financial tie to the product being discussed and 35% of stories did not go beyond parroting a news release from the manufacturer of the product.

Schwitzer’s conclusions are basically that he’s doing good work – and that is true. Take a look at his site – the “0 Star Stories” are particularly fun. Schwitzer places the bulk of the blame on the news outlets themselves rather than the journalists. He recognizes that in the era of media consolidation many newsrooms have eliminated trained science journalists. He urges the reader to check out his site for the best health care news analysis.

The problem is that not very many people know about Schwitzer’s site. I frequently rant about how shabby and corrupt the mainstream media has become and am a scientist and I hadn’t heard of it. The problem is that most people still get their science news from the mainstream media and they are being misled most of the time. With the continued consolidiation of media outlets, most of whom are owned by conglomerates who also have interests in pharmaceuitical companies, it’s not outlandish to believe that this is intentional. I know that I’m preaching to the choir – if you’re reading a blog then you’ve already discovered the new media. But if you’re still getting your science news from the Today Show then the best case scenario is that you’re not getting all the facts. The worst case scenario is that you’re being lied to. Here are links to a few good “new media” alternatives:

• Science Daily
• Science News
• New Scientist
• Nature News

Also check out some of the sites on my “Science” blogroll.

International readers may wonder where I’m going here.”Yeah, yeah”, they’ll say, “What’s the issue? Let’s see some more pictures of that kid.” The issue is, as one federal judge put it, “the utter waste of monetary and personal resources” that is the debate over teaching evolution in school. One of the lovely side-effects of six years of whack-job rule was that the far right got cocky and started pushing either the outright banning of the teaching of evolution in public schools or at the very least giving equal time to a bollocks “theory” known as Intelligent Design (ID). ID is nothing more than creationism in a lab coat. It espouses the theory that the world was created by an “intelligent designer”some time in the last 10,000 years and that life as we know it appeared at roughly the same time. It differs very little from the creation fable in Genesis.

Fortunately, the federal courts have ruled that ID, as with other religious alternatives to evolution, can not be presented in the public schools as doing so violates the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution. This should protect at least the 90% of American students that attend public schools. According to a recent study in PLoS Biology, this is frighteningly not the case. A group of political scientists at Penn State University led by Michael B. Berkman performed a survey of public high school teachers regarding the amount of time they devote to teaching evolution.

Berkman’s group found that 98% of high school Biology teachers spent at least an hour on general evolutionary processes – OK so far, though I’m curious about that two percent. When it came to teaching human evolution – the shocking idea that we diverged from a common ancestor with apes a couple of million years ago – 17% of teachers chose to eschew the topic entirely. What’s even more disturbing us that 25% of public school teachers dedicated at least an hour to teaching creationism or ID – in direct violation of the law and common sense. For me, the most shocking finding reported in this paper is that 48% of the American public believes that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.” Who are you, 48% of Americans? Could you please out yourself so we can have a serious discussion about science and the origin of life? I can understand the importance of religion and I respect that, I really do. But you don’t believe everything in the Bible is literally true, do you? Can’t we just read the creation story as allegory and move on?

I know that this post is probably going to anger some of my readers. I don’t apologize for that. It angers me that if I had a child in the secular, public school system in the U.S. – and I’m more and more grateful that this is not likely to be the case – that he may be exposed to a theory (no, “theory” gives ID too much credence) an insane belief that flies in the face of hundreds of years of scientific data. Even worse, he may be taught that what is basically the unifying principle of biology is no more valid than this myth of divine creation. I have lots of superstitions and crazy beliefs and I suspect that you wouldn’t want me to teach them to your children as an alternative to established truths nor I would presume to do so. I have the utmost respect for your faith – I have a fair bit of my own – but please, keep it out of the public schools.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune disorder in which the immune system turns on the body’s joints. It is a disabling and painful inflammatory condition, which can result in an increased risk in cardiovascular disease. RA is incurable and its causes are unclear, although there are a number of plausible theories.

Suffererers of RA tend to display abnormal lipoprotein (cholesterol and trigylceride) levels, which is often associated with disease symptoms. Bearing this in mind, a Swedish research group hypothesized that dietary changes, particularly those that would restrict intake of saturated fats, that regulate the levels of these lipoproteins may be part of an effective treatment for RA. Led by Johan Frostegard of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, they randomly assigned (sentenced) volunteers to either a vegan, gluten free diet or a well-balanced normal diet for a year. Both diets were composed of roughly the same ratios of protein, carbohydrates and fat with the only major difference being the lack of animal and wheat products in the vegan diet. The researchers then analyzed blood lipid levels after both three months and a year.

First, it’s amusing that about one quarter of the patients that found themselves involuntary vegans quit the study before the three month time point. That would have been me. But for those that struggled through, the Swedish group found that a vegan diet induced decreases in total cholesterol, body mass index and in the ratio of LDL:HDL cholesterol. These changes in lipoprotein profile are more similar to those seen in healthy, non-RA individuals.

Frostegard’s group concludes that a gluten-free vegan diet are potentially anti-inflammatory and protective against RA. What they do not show is any alleviation of RA symptoms – probably the bigger issue for the patients. However, the biggest problem with this study is that it gives vegans, who already think that they’re saving the planet and all its fauna, something else to be smug about. Nonetheless, the results are compelling as the only difference between the two diets was in the amount of saturated fat. Dietary changes alone are probably not an effective treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, but the changes in lipoprotein levels that they can induce are certainly not going to hurt.

I wonder if the researchers are vegans? Ah well, never mind, all this talk about foot has made me hungry and it’s nearly lunch – today it’s that great British dish bangers and mash.

-Jay Farrar – “Feel Free”

There is nothing to induce a simmering fury in me on my morning bicycle commute like following a diesel exhaust spewing, and inconsiderately piloted, bus. The narrow streets of Oxford barely allow for two cars to pass side-by-side – nevermind buses, vans and trucks – and the dark stains on the beautiful sandstone buildings attest to the long term effects of pollution from vehicle exhaust.

A study that I found this week at BioMed Central explores the shorter term effects of one type of vehicle exhaust on peoples brains. It seems that there may be a biological reason for my frustration at tailing a bus into the Oxford city center. Writing in Particle and Fibre Toxicology, a group led by Paul Borm at Zuyd University in the Netherlands looked at brain activity of volunteers exposed to diesel exhaust and found some interesting changes.

Diesel fumes in general have previously been shown to cause pulmonary inflammation and other more systemic health effects. Borm’s group is focused on the particulate matter, particularly nanoparticles, that are plentiful in diesel exhaust. It has been previously shown that nanoparticles can moveto the brain through olfactory nerves. Many of these nanoparticles are strong inducers of oxidative stress, a chemical process that has been implicated in neurodegenerative disease like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

Based on these previous results, Borm and his colleagues exposed volunteers to either diesel exhaust or filtered air for one hour. During that time, and for an additional hour after exposure, the volunteers’ brain activity was monitored by quantitative electroencephalography (EEG). The researchers found that there was a significant increase in brain activity in response to diesel exhaust particularly in the left frontal cortex after a half hour of exposure. Interestingly, this increase in activity continues even after the diesel exhaust is removed.

So, the take home message is that exposure to diesel exhaust causing some kind of temporary but detectable change in brain activity. The left frontal cortex is a pretty general localization of this activity and there is no empirical data to determine the biological relevance of the increased activity. Borm interprets it as a cortical stress response – the brain trying to deal with potentially dangerous toxins – but they don’t carry out the experiments necessary to determine what is actually happening in the volunteers’ noggins. In addition, the Dutch researchers are really interested in the effect of nanoparticles in particular rather than diesel exhaust more generally so they kind of miss the forest for the nanoparticles. The changes in brain activity alone are interesting as this is the first study to demonstrate a quantitative neurological effect of exposure to diesel exhaust. The more interesting follow-up experiments would focus more specifically on what regions of the brain are being affected, how long the effects last and what level of exposure is required to induce changes.

Jay Farrar’s “Sebastopol” is available from Amazon and .

One of the several things that I will miss about working in academia is unfettered access to academic journals. The cliche of academics locked away in ivory towers is reinforced by the unfortunate fact that many, and certainly the most important, of our journals are protected by a heavy subscription fee. An annual personal subscription to Nature, for example, is $200 (US). It’s kind of a hefty cover charge to get into the club. Effectively this prevents the general public from participating much in the scientific discussion – particularly unhelpful for those lay people that are slightly suspicious of scientists and their work.

To counter this ivory tower attitude, groups of scientists got together in 2002 and 2003 to push for open access to scientific literature online. Currently about 10 percent of academic journals offer free access to all of their contents. The primary criticism of open access journals is financial. Because they don’t receive subscription fees, OA journals charge a higher publication fee to researchers. This is kind of a bogus argument as nearly all journals, OA or subscription, use a pay to play policy.

The other problem with OA journals is that they don’t get the hottest research. If you’re a scientist and you put together some groundbreaking work – you go to Nature or Science or the high impact journal in your field. Open Access journals may not get the “sexiest” science, but they often publish thought provoking, beautifully designed or controversial papers. One of my favorite Science Tuesday posts was from a PLoS journal discussing the origins of syphilis – great stuff.

All this is leading up to the announcement that Science Tuesday, from now on, will feature only Open Access research. Unfortunately this is due more to necessity than a grand moral stand, but it’s all about the ends. This inevitably means that I’ll miss out on a lot of the hot news science, but the traditional media outlets cover that anyway. So come here looking for the quirky, clever and subtle science that often gets missed by the big guys.

In that vein, I have an odd one for the first Open Access Science Tuesday. BioMed Central is an OA publisher with nearly 200 journals in their stables. Earlier this week they featured an strange little study coming out of the University of Maryland that caught my eye. A research group led by Amelia Arria report in Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention & Policy results that may suggest that nosy parents, those that pay attention to what their kids are doing, are better at keeping their kids out of trouble with the bottle in college.

Yes, I can hear the “no, duh” chorus. But before we jettison this into the Journal of the Bloody Obvious, let’s take a look at what Arria’s group actually did. The Maryland researchers began this study with the hypothesis that parental monitoring in high school can have a long term protective effect on drinking once the kids leave home. To address this question Arria’s group surveyed over 1,200 students both the summer before they went to university and during the first year at university. They were asked not only about their drinking habits but also relationship with their parents.

There is a lot of statistical wrangling in this study, as the researchers are trying to eliminate variables other than parental monitoring in high school. For example, white students drink more than black students, men drink more than women and, surprise, members of fraternities and sororities drink more than non-members. Ground breaking research in College Park. After all the statistical manipulation Arria’s group find that the only real relationship between parental monitoring and college drinking is that those who drank less in high school due to parental discouragement continue to drink less in college. Once the variation in high school drinking was ignored there was no significant long-term parental effect. Take home message from the data as I see it – once kids leave the nest your influence as a parent wanes kind of quickly.

Arria, however, sees it differently. One of the things that really amused me about this paper was its built in disclaimers. Anyone who’s ever published a scientific paper knows that to avoid getting destroyed by reviewers you have to include little caveats – statements of uncertainty about your concusions, wiggle room if you will. Arria’s group has a couple of pages of these including (but not limited to) the recognition that college students are a pretty limited sample set, college drinking takes on many manifestations (binge versus daily), the measure of paternal monitoring is based on the children’s impression and that the study only looks at one time point in adolescence. A big one that they left out is that people lie, particularly those with substance abuse problems and poor relationships with their parents. Despite all these caveats and their own results, the researchers still conclude that parental monitoring is a key to curbing high-risk drinking in college. Probably true, but kind of not supported by your own data. Open Access Science Tuesday is going to be fun!

Image Credits:

Reaching

Atheneum

Helicopter Parents

The problem is that an increasing number of scientific studies are indicating that corn-based ethanol may not be the green giant that folks thought. Just before Christmas a letter to Science by a respected ecologist suggested that the jump in corn farming in the U.S. has led to increased Amazonian deforestation. Grain prices hit record highs in the summer of 2007 due at least in part to the massive increase in demand for ethanol. This week, two papers in Science propose that the real costs of the ethanol boom may not be an increase in food prices but, ironically, an increase in atmospheric carbon.

The first of these studies stems from a collaboration between scientists from The Nature Conservancy and the University of Minnesota. Led by ecologist David Tilman, they predict that the conversion of uncultivated land in Southeast Asia, Brazil and the U.S. that would be required to deal with the increased demand for biofuels will result in a “biofuel carbon debt”. Atmospheric carbon is the problem in global climate change. The hope for biofuels is that their use reduces atmospheric carbon because growing more plants sucks up more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The problem with that theory is that fallow lands sequester a lot of carbon. This is both due to existing plants which remove carbon from the air but also carbon that is sequestered in the soil and biomass. In other word, if you clear an acre of forest to plant corn you remove the photosynthetic trees and understory plants and then burn them, releasing their fixed carbon into the atmosphere. Tilman’s group claims that conversions like these would release 17 to 420 times more carbon dioxide than the annual greenhouse gas reductions that ethanol would provide.

The companion paper, written by a collaboration of scientists from Princeton University, Woods Hole Research Center and Iowa State University generally confirms the Tilman group’s results. These researchers, led by Princeton’s Timothy Searchinger, used a worldwide agricultural model to predict greenhouse emissions over the next several decade under a variety of conditions. They found that corn-based ethanol production will double greenhouse gas emissions over 30 years rather than producing a 20% reduction as previous models predicted. Other crops are slightly better – switchgrass, George Bush’s favorite, would increase emissions by 50% and sugar cane only induces a four year carbon debt. Of course, the latter only applies if tropical cattle ranchers conveniently disappear.

In summary, these studies suggest that if we are to sustain world food production at current levels, crop based ethanol production will produce more atmospheric carbon then what we are currently generating. It is worth noting that both of these studies rely on complicated ecological models rather than any empirical data and I’m not enough of a modeler to properly critique their methods. That being said, most climate science and most of our fears about climate change are based on predictive models. This is what allows the climate change deniers to maintain any level of credibility.

It is not, however, all bad news. There are other sources for biofuel production beyond corn, switchgrass and sugar cane. Municipal and crop waste is a ripe source of energy that otherwise will be released as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Use of these materials would also reduce landfill inputs. Perennial plants grown on abandoned agricultural lands are another source that would incur little carbon debt. The take home message from both of these papers is that we should pour resources into improving the efficiency of ethanol or other biofuel production from these waste products – effectively killing two birds with one stone.

Image Credits:

Carbon cycle

Biofuels

Bob Moore (the lead author on this study), Carter and their colleagues describe Chromera velia, now the closest-known photosynthetic relative to apicomplexan parasites – including the one that causes malaria. The discovery and phylogenetic characterization of Chromera illuminates a murky step in the evolution of photosynthesis. This close evolutionary relationship also means that Chromera will be a powerful model system for studying apicomplexan diseases.

Carter took a seat on the virtual couch to discuss her group’s recent discoveries:

CDV: My readers run the gamut from working scientists to lay persons. Can you clearly and concisely explain to the latter class why they should pay attention?

DC: Malaria and other diseases caused by organisms belonging to the class of parasites known as the apicomplexans kill and disable millions of people every year. Even in developed countries we see malaria in travelers returning from overseas, we have home-grown cases of toxoplasmosis and cryptosporidiosis (both apicomplexan diseases), and other parasites cause huge losses to our poultry and livestock industries.

CDV: In terms of the apicomplexa that are disease causing parasites, does your work bear any medical implications – improved treatment options for apicomplexan illnesses, for example?

DC: These parasites are difficult to treat and they are difficult to work on as they need to be grown in living host cells. Chromera can be grown on simple laboratory media and because of it’s close relationship to the parasites can potentially serve as a surrogate host for developing anti-parasitic drugs. It can also tell us something about how these parasites, which were in fact once algae themselves, evolved.

CDV: I noticed that Chromera velia was isolated from some stony coral in Sydney Harbour. I think it’s a great part of the story – you found what is essentially one of those holy grails of evolutionary biology – an extant missing link. Was this a serendipitous discovery? If so, what were you looking for out in the harbour?

DC: Yes, I have to admit that it was serendipitous! We were looking for the algal symbionts that inhabit corals and allow them to grow. These are expelled during coral bleaching and knowing their lifecycle and biodiversity is very important for reef conservation. Bob Moore, who was doing his PhD in my lab at the time, had a few samples from Sydney harbour and thought he would keep other algae that he came across as well – and one of these turned out to be Chromera. It was thanks to Bob’s scientific curiosity and his perseverance with this culture that this discovery was made.

CDV: Does Chromera velia tell us anything about the original endosymbiotic event that resulted in photosynthetic organisms? Perhaps more appropriately, was there one or multiple endosymbiotic events leading to the chloroplasts found in “higher” plants?

DC: No, not really about the original event –that’s going a very long way back. We do know there have been more than one event because extant organism are pigmented by different chlorophylls that have different origins.

CDV: For the technical wonks in the audience, how do you isolate a homogenous culture of a microscopic organism from a wild collection? It doesn’t seem a trivial task, particularly to get a pure enough culture to isolate genomic DNA. What controls do you employ to guarantee an axenic culture?

DC: We use standard environmental microbiology techniques of swabbing or streaking the material of interest onto an agar plate. We incorporated antibiotics in the plates to get rid of bacteria. Bob also developed a novel medium that contained bleach – he reasoned the algae would get eaten by reef fishes and would be able to tolerate high levels of hydrogen chloride – and this seemed to select for Chromera. Once the cultures are plated out we leave them to grow into colonies, pick off single colonies and subculture these until we are sure that they are pure.

CDV: If I read your results correctly, they suggest that the loss of photosynthesis led to the evolution of parasitism in Apicomplexa. This makes sense – you lose photosynthesis so have to find another energy source, like a host organism. Is this an evolutionary novelty? It seems that in most cases loss of your primary energy producing biological pathway would be an evolutionary dead end. Are there other examples of loss of photosynthesis?

DC: The apicomplexans are the only organism where we can say this has certainly happened, as they are the only ones yet found that have a relic chloroplast. I would say that the loss occurred during the transition to parasitism – the apicomplexans were already endosymbionts (that is, they could live in the cells of other organisms) and gradually evolved ways to extract more and more of their requirements from their host until making their own energy became unnecessary. Note that their relatives, the symbiotic dinoflagellates, live inside corals and are endosymbiotic –but the host controls the relationship so that they don’t invade and cause damage. It will be very interesting to see where Chromera fits on the spectrum from symbiont – free living – parasite, since it too was found in corals but has lost one of its photosynthetic pigments, so might be losing photosynthesis.

CDV: One of my scientific heroes, Edmund O. Wilson has suggested that we have identified only a fraction of the species on the planet, maybe as low as about 1.5% and that up to 50% of the extant species today could be extinct by the end of this century. Your discovery of a previously unidentified species supports Wilson’s idea that we’re missing out on a lot of life on earth. What do you think about his second idea – are we losing biodiversity that rapidly and how concerned should we be?

DC: I think we know a lot about the world’s big organisms but very little about the very small ones – there are plenty of studies that show you can only culture a small fraction of the microbial diversity that is present. I think we should all be very concerned about the loss of biodiversity that we are experiencing, not only because of the loss of important life forms but also because this can have other, more far-reaching ramifications. We see this on coral reefs where loss of microscopic algae leads to coral bleaching and coral mortality, with knock-on effects to the rest of the coral ecosystem including fish, anenomies, marine insects, other microbes, etc. Much of life is part of a delicately balanced system that has evolved over millennia – once gone they will take millennia to regenerate.

CDV: What’s the next Nature paper to come from the Carter Lab?

DC: The Chromera genome – if we can get the funds to do it!

—————–

Thanks to Dee for being a sport. If you want to read more, check out the original paper here (or here) and Patrick Keeling’s review here.

Image Credits:

Sydney Harbour

Plesiastria

Apicomplexan

The Drive-By Truckers – “The Deeper In”

Geneticists love nothing more than a good inbred organism with which to work – yep, we’re fun people. When you’re trying to determine the genetic source of a particular trait, the less genetic variability the better. With a nicely inbred genetic model organism, the researcher can assume that when a interesting heritable trait is found that everything else is the same except for the mutation that causes that trait. So, the laboratory strains of model genetic organisms that most researchers work with tend to be highly inbred.

That’s fine for your average laboratory fruit fly, but inbreeding tends not to work so well in the wild – just take a look at the guests on the Jerry Springer Show or your average pug. The biggest problem that you run across if you have a lot of relations with the relations is that you increase the likelihood of accumulating harmful mutations. For example, if a recessive mutation that is responsible for some horrible disease is lurking around in a family’s genome, children are more likely to end up with two copies of the mutation – and thus the disease – if their parents both come from the same family.

This week a group of researchers from Iceland published results in Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.1150232) suggesting that a little bit of inbreeding isn’t always a bad
thing. There have been studies in the past that provided evidence that consanguineous unions (relations between relations) provided economic advantages in some cultures by keeping land and resources within an extended family. Biologically, previous demographic studies have reported that when parents were related – usually first or second cousins – they tended to produce more offspring. [Insert your own Appalachia joke here.] But while this correlation is fairly robust, it has never been clear how much of this was due to differences in socio-economic factors between cultures in which consanguineous relations were common versus those in which they were not. In a way, it’s a classic example of a nature versus nurture debate – how much of this increased fertility is due to biology and how much due to cultural variables.

The Icelandic team, led by Agnar Helgason of deCODE Genetics and the University of Iceland, plowed through a century and a half of genealogical records tracing the ancestry of over 160,000 of their countrymen in an attempt to address this question. What makes this population useful for the question at hand is that it is smaller and more socioeconomically homogenous than populations used in previous studies. Helgason’s team assumes that this allows them to ignore the cultural variables and just focus on biological issues. Helgason and his colleagues found, as had previous studies, that the more closely related couples tended to have more children and grandchildren. The catch is that the children of the most closely related parents – first or second cousins – died younger and reproduced less. Interestingly, even though the instances of consanguineous relationships have declined steadily since 1800 (from 0.5% in 1800 to 0.05% in 1950), the relationship between kinship and increased fertility is maintained.

The conclusion that the Icelandic team draws is that because they have effectively eliminated the socioeconomic factors in their “culturally homogenous” population that their is a biological advantage in terms of reproductive success to limited inbreeding. The problem is that the reader is asked to take the researchers’ word for this claim on spec. The authors cite a UN Human Development Report and unpublished report from York University in support but neither of these reports have undergone the rigorous peer review process to which most legitimate scientific research is subjected. This isn’t to say that their results are bogus, it is probably a pretty safe assumption that prior to the 1950’s Iceland was a very socially (and genetically) homogenous culture. The fact that the general trends regarding reproductive success are maintained over a period of 150 years is a pretty strong indication that it occurs independently of changes in cultural mores. If their results are repeatable and robust they suggest that limited inbreeding does improve reproductive success – potentially a useful innovation for small geographically isolated populations.

I guess the take home message is if you have a hankering for your cousin it isn’t going to be Biology that tells you to cool down.

Image Credits:

The wonderful photo of Icelandic faces at the start of this post is from Stuck in Customs.

Dancing Icelanders

Hot springs

The Drive By Truckers’ wonderful “Decoration Day” is available from , Amazon and eMusic.

Joni Mitchell – “Big Yellow Taxi”

A freshwater dolphin, known as the baiji, indigenous to the Yangtze River in China is probably now extinct. This is thought to be due to a number of factors, including pollution, damming of rivers, but largely unsustainable fishing practices. This is one of those things that happen when unrestricted capitalism takes over in a country with over a billion people. China’s fish exports doubled from 2004 to 2006 – largely to the US and Mexico. China needs more fish, bothersome sustainable fishing techniques just get in the way, so get fish however you can dolphins be damned. We know that China is really struggling with unregulated growth of their noveau capitalist economy. More and more contaminated foods are turning up in the West – even Wal-Mart recently banned Chinese catfish fillets (a little late for the baiji) – and the pet food stories have been well publicized.

What got my thinking about this was an interview of Edward O. Wilson by Bill Moyers on the podcast version of his excellent “Journal” program. Wilson is an entomologist and ecologist who has been lately studying mass extinction. Since I got into science, I’ve always been a fan of Wilson’s. He grew up in the country around Mobile, Alabama, got through the questionable Southern public school system and made his name studying fire ants - really making the best of your surrounding. A recent project of Wilson’s has been The Encyclopedia of Life – an online encyclopedia of every species on the planet. Wilson asks us to “imagine an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth available by single access on command.” The effort seems to have stalled recently, but the ambitious idea is a good one. There may be between 30 and 100 million species on the planet of which only 1.6 million have been identified, and there’s no central repository of information on those.

What struck me more from this interview, however, was Wilson’s discussion of extinction. There are predictions that nearly 50% of species will be extinct by the end of the 21st century. The occasional big mammal like the baiji is the exception. Most of the things that will become extinct are microorganisms, some of these we may not even know had existed. Wilson talks about ecosystems as a fragile network and there is no way to predict what effect these extinctions might have on the whole. For the capitalist in the audience, many of these organisms are economically crucial for things like crop pollination (where are the bees going?) and water purification.

Wilson’s most recent book is called “The Creation” and is targeted to the fundamentalist religious reader – those who don’t believe in evolution. Unlike the antagonistic vitriol of an author/scientist like Richard Dawkins, Wilson asks the reader to set aside differences of opinion regarding the origins of the planet. Instead he asks the reader to concentrate what the scientist and the religious believer have in common – an [tag]ecological[/tag] crisis. Even one who truly believes that God created the earth as stated in the bible must recognize that stewardship of that creation is crucial. This approach to swaying opinions is a good one, I think. We scientists often speak with the arrogance of presumed knowledge which can immediately turn off the lay man. I was listening to a debate about whether global warming was real or not. The global-warming-doesn’t-exist side was using all kinds of bogus science to support their cause and the other side was getting frustrated. One of them said something like, the other side is using dodgy science but if I try to explain why that is the case “this audience” wouldn’t understand. There’s a successful debating tool – insult the intelligence of your audience. In this book, Wilson tries to bridge that gap. Let’s hope, for all of our sakes, that he’s successful.

“Here we stand
Like an Adam and an Eve
Waterfalls
The Garden of Eden
Two fools in love
So beautiful and strong
The birds in the trees
Are smiling upon them
From the age of the dinosaurs
Cars have run on gasoline
Where, where have they gone?
Now, it’s nothing but flowers…”

-Talking Heads – “(Nothing But) Flowers”