Lightning rod

In 1904, biologist Joseph Grinnell formulated what has since become known as the Competitive Exclusion Principle: if two species overlap in their niches, the degree of overlap correlates to the degree of competition between them.  If the competition becomes too high, eventually one of them is outcompeted and dies out.

Contrary to the "Nature is red in tooth and claw" view of the natural world, however, many species solve the problem of competitive exclusion in remarkable peaceable ways.  Some partition the habitat -- for example, species of insect-eating warblers in my part of the world avoid competing for food by splitting up where they forage, with some species mostly staying in the treetops, others in the the forest midstory or undergrowth.  Elaborate cooperative strategies are also remarkably common -- witness lichens, which are a symbiotic pairing of an algae species and a fungus, where the fungus gives the algae housing, and the algae photosynthesizes and donates some of the nutrients to its host.

So despite how it's often characterized, nature doesn't always land on the violent solution.

Sometimes, though...

There's a rain forest tree found in Panama called the almendro (Dipteryx oleifera).  It's in the bean family, Fabaceae, which you can tell if you look at its pinnately-compound leaves and showy flowers:

It can get up to 55 meters tall, which is a necessity in the rain forest.  Dense patches of rain forest have such a thick covering of leaves that only two percent of the incident sunlight reaches the forest floor.  Understory plants have evolved to cope with the perpetual twilight -- this is one of the reasons why rain forest plants often have very dark green leaves.  The density of pigments allows them to trap every photon of light they manage to receive.

Trees, though, compete by elbowing each other out of the way, trying to grow as tall as possible so as to access light, and in the process, shade out the abundant competition.  But not only do rain forest trees have to worry about nearby trees, they also have to deal with lianas, vining species that twine up tree trunks and drape themselves over the canopy, hitching a ride on their taller, sturdier neighbors, and shading them out in the process.

Well, the almendro has evolved a strategy for dealing with all of that at once.

A study this week in New Phytologist looked at a peculiar pattern that ecologist Evan Gora, of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, had noticed: almendros seemed to have an unusually high likelihood of being struck by lightning, but almost never sustained any significant damage from it.  Well, after a five-year study, Gora and his collaborators found that almendros that were struck usually just lost some leaves and small branches, while other species sustained significant damage, with 64% of the struck trees dying within two years.

Not only that, but the lightning strikes completely wipe out any lianas.  Almendros that were hit by lightning not only recovered quickly, they had their tangle of vines blown to smithereens.  And neighboring trees that were jolted by the strike -- through sparks jumping from the almendro -- often died, too, freeing up more living room.

The data shows that living near an almendro raises a neighboring tree's likelihood of being killed by a lightning strike by 48%.  "Any tree that gets close," Gora said, "eventually gets electrocuted."

How the almendro has managed to evolve into a natural lightning rod is uncertain, but it has been found that the cells in its wood have wider channels for water transport, making the wood more electrically conductive.  Most of the damage to trees from lightning strikes occurs because internal resistance causes the electrical energy to dissipate as heat, making the sap boil and triggering the trunk to explode.  Lowering the electrical resistance allows the current to pass through the trunk and safely into the ground with less heating.  This means that not only does the almendro not suffer as much damage, it actually attracts lightning -- electrical discharges tend to follow the path of least resistance.

So even if sometimes the natural world does evolve nice, friendly, cooperative solutions to the problems of survival, sometimes it... doesn't.  Even the trees don't always.  Like the Ents and Huorns from Tolkien's Fangorn Forest, sometimes the trees deal with their enemies by taking matters into their own... um... branches.

Think about that next time you're going for a nice stroll in the woods.

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The rules of the game

There's a lot of human behavior that, looked at from a perspective as if you were studying us from the outside -- say, as an alien anthropologist -- is mighty weird.

One example is our fondness for playing games.  We make up lists of often arbitrary rules, then individuals or groups compete against each other while following those rules to achieve some sort of goal -- which almost always is itself symbolic (other than professional sports and gambling, most games don't actually involve winning some sort of tangible reward).  Despite the fact that there's every reason to care very little about the outcome, from a very early age we learn to care deeply.  Many of us have the attitude imbued in me by my high school track coach -- "Second place is first loser" -- and that applies to everything from the Olympics to a game of Monopoly.

This drive is so strong that a lot of us become seriously invested in vicariously playing games by watching other people play them -- i.e., sports.  There have been fan riots when the home team doesn't win; people are willing to go on the rampage, destroying property and risking injuring others or themselves, because they're so angry that "their team" lost.  (A guy who's a friend of a friend once actually went outside and smashed a chair when the Buffalo Bills lost.)

And as I've written about before, the tendency to take sports extremely seriously isn't limited to the industrialized world.  The Mesoamerican ball games of the Classical Mayan civilization were deadly serious, and I mean that quite literally.

The losers were sacrificed to the gods.

Game-playing is one of those ubiquitous behaviors that's so common it's taken for granted, and is odd only when you think about it too hard -- but once you do, it seems so weird you have to wonder why it's nearly universal in all human cultures.  Sociologist Jonathan Haidt speculates that it's what psychologists call sublimation -- that it's a way of processing aggression harmlessly.  "Sports is to war as pornography is to sex," Haidt says.  "We get to exercise some ancient drives."

Whatever the explanation, there's no doubt that game-playing is not only widespread, it's very, very old.  A paper this week in the European Journal of Archaeology describes the discovery of what appears to be one of the oldest known examples of a board game, painted onto rock surfaces in what is now Azerbaijan.  The pattern is very similar to a game known from Ancient Egypt they called "Hounds and Jackals" (from the shapes of the game pieces).  The rules aren't known, but it appears to be a chase game, with potentials for pieces to jump ahead or get set back -- so perhaps a little similar to the familiar games of backgammon, parcheesi, and "Snakes and Ladders" (more commonly known in the United States as "Chutes and Ladders").

Two of the Azerbaijani game boards [Image credit: W. Crist and R. Abdullayev]

The archaeologists who authored the paper, Walter Crist of Leiden University and Rahman Abdullayev of the Minnesota Historical Society,  found six game boards (if that's what they turn out to be) at sites in Azerbaijan --  three at Ağdaşdüzü, and one each at Çapmalı, Yenı Türkan, and Dübəndi.  It's difficult to date stone artifacts accurately, but carbon dating of organic remains in the area suggests that they're about four thousand years old.  The similarity between all six strongly suggests that playing this particular game was widespread at the time -- and that the pattern would have been as as familiar and instantly recognizable to them as a Scrabble board is to us.

"Whatever the origin of the game of [Hounds and Jackals], it was quickly adopted and played by a wide variety of people, from the nobility of Middle Kingdom Egypt to the cattle herders of the Caucasus, and from the Old Assyrian traders in Anatolia to the workers who built Middle Kingdom pyramids," the researchers write.  "The fast spread of this game attests to the ability of games to act as social lubricants, facilitating interactions across social boundaries."

So board games have a very long history.  Gaming in general is certainly even older than that; artifacts that appear to be dice made of bone were found at Skara Brae in Scotland, and dated to around 3000 B.C.E.  So whatever drive it is that induces us to invent new ways to compete against each other, it goes back into our very distant past.

I'm not immune.  Whenever I'm in a competition, I get ridiculously invested in it.  I'm a runner, and have participated in various 5K and 10K races, and even though I know going in I'm not nearly good enough to come in first (or even first in my age category), I still get wicked frustrated when I have to run my finger halfway down the page of standings to find out where I finished.  And although I'm not a sports fan, all you have to do is get me involved in a game of Scattergories to find out how competitive I am.

Yes, I know the outcome doesn't matter.  But hey, if the people four millennia ago were that invested in playing Hounds and Jackals, at least I come by the tendency honorably.

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Little fish

I had an interesting, and rather revelatory, experience this summer.

One of my passions is running.  Well, to be more accurate, I like having run.  While I'm out there, slogging up the hills and dripping sweat, I am most frequently asking myself why the hell I do this, when it is clearly painful, exhausting, and generally unpleasant.  But afterward I always feel better, and every time I've raced I come home and signed up for more races.

As a friend of mine put it, it's a little like the guy who smacks his head on the wall because it feels so good when he stops.

In any case, in May I signed up for the One New York Challenge, a five-hundred-kilometer "virtual race" across New York, the proceeds from which were donated to COVID research.  We had from May 15 to August 31 to finish, and there was a leaderboard that was updated daily to keep track of everyone's submitted mileage and times, so you could see how you ranked against other participants.

Well, this is where the trouble started.  Because I'm not all that great at running -- I'll be up-front about that -- but I am insanely competitive.  So every day I'd enter my miles (I run an average five miles a day, pretty much without exception), then immediately log on to the leaderboard to see how -- or if -- my place had shifted.

I ended up finishing the race way ahead of the deadline, with over a month to spare, crossing the finish line in 827th place overall (out of 6,428 participants), and in 30th place (out of 151) in my age class.

Me after finishing the 499th kilometer

So reason to be proud, right?  Not only finishing the race, but in the top fifteen percent out of everyone and in the top twenty percent in my age class.

But all I could focus on was thinking, "Holy shit.  826 people were faster than me."

Turns out I'm not alone in doing this, self-defeating as it is.  A study this week in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science found that we feel much better about ourselves when we're big fish in a little pond than when we're little fish in a big pond -- even if our own skill level is the same in both situations.

In "Taking Social Comparison to the Extremes: The Huge-Fish-Tiny-Pond Effect in Self-Evaluations," by Ethan Zell and Tara Lesick of the University of North Carolina, we find out that we pay much closer attention to our in-group ranking (whatever the size and skill level of the group) than we do to how the whole group ranks against other groups.  Put a different way, most of us are much happier ranking higher amongst peers who as a whole are mediocre than ranking lower amongst the elite.

And doesn't just affect our emotional states, it affects how we actually evaluate our own skill level.  The setup of the experiment involved the administration of a verbal-reasoning test to students at a variety of colleges.  Participants were given their scores, and two other pieces of information; how they ranked against other participants from their own college, and how their college ranked against other colleges.  Afterward, each volunteer was asked how they felt about their performance, and to evaluate their own verbal-reasoning ability not just against their peers but in a general, global sense.

Naturally, high scorers at highly-ranked colleges were not only happy with their performance, but felt pretty confident about their skill.  More interesting were the high scorers at low-ranked colleges, and the low scorers at highly-ranked colleges.  The former had the same glowing assessment of their own skills and performance as the high scorers at highly-ranked colleges, while the latter were generally disappointed with their skills and performance -- even when the overall scores of the members of the two groups were similar.

It makes sense, I suppose, given our long history of tribalism.  If Zog is competing against Thak in boulder-throwing, his rival's performance is right there in front of him, immediate and obvious.  It's way less obvious (and often much less important in the here-and-now) if Zog's whole tribe is made up of elite boulder-throwers or if, to put it bluntly, they suck.  I know it's always thin ice to attribute psychological tendencies to evolutionary history, but there's a good argument that the disappointment of the little-fish-big-pond experience is built into our brains by our having evolved living in small, tightly-knit groups.

In my own experience, being a mediocre racer in a very large group slowed me down for a bit, but (fortunately) hasn't stopped me.  Three weeks ago I started a new challenge; to run four hundred miles in 108 days.  (Five hundred kilometers -- 310 miles -- was apparently not enough, for some reason.)  It's for a good cause -- my sign-up money goes to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.  And there's swag to look forward to when I'm done, including another badly-needed race t-shirt, to add to the 793 race t-shirts I already own.

Twenty days in, I've already got 25% of the miles completed.  I'm currently 192nd overall (out of 1,716 participants) and 8th in my age class (out of 30).  Which is entirely unacceptable. 

Time to get out running again and see if I can pass a few of these folks.

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To the layperson, there's something odd about physicists' search for (amongst many other things) a Grand Unified Theory, that unites the four fundamental forces into one elegant model.

Why do they think that there is such a theory?  Strange as it sounds, a lot of them say it's because having one force of the four (gravitation) not accounted for by the model, and requiring its own separate equations to explain, is "messy."  Or "inelegant."  Or -- most tellingly -- "ugly."

So, put simply; why do physicists have the tendency to think that for a theory to be true, it has to be elegant and beautiful?  Couldn't the universe just be chaotic and weird, with different facets of it obeying their own unrelated laws, with no unifying explanation to account for it all?

This is the question that physicist Sabine Hossenfelder addresses in her wonderful book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physicists Astray.  She makes a bold statement; that this search for beauty and elegance in the mathematical models has diverted theoretical physics into untestable, unverifiable cul-de-sacs, blinding researchers to the reality -- the experimental evidence.

Whatever you think about whether the universe should obey aesthetically pleasing rules, or whether you're okay with weirdness and messiness, Hossenfelder's book will challenge your perception of how science is done.  It's a fascinating, fun, and enlightening read for anyone interested in learning about the arcane reaches of physics.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Big voices

One of the funniest scenes in the Monty Python movie Life of Brian is when a man is condemned to be stoned for saying "Jehovah," and the High Priest (played by John Cleese) is facing a crowd which is already armed with stones, ready to carry out the sentence.  The crowd, unbeknownst to the High Priest, is made up of women (who by law are forbidden from being there), and it's even funnier because that means the crowd was men playing women who were pretending they were men.

Well, at one point in the proceedings, the High Priest says the word "Jehovah" and gets clunked in the head by a rock.  He then demands to know who threw the rock.

A chorus of high-pitched, pseudo-feminine voices shouts, "She did!  She did!  She did!... um...."  (continuing in deeper, masculine voices)  "He did!  He did!  He did!"

This was the first thing my rather loopy brain thought of when I read a paper yesterday in Biology Letters.  In "Acoustic Allometry and Vocal Learning in Mammals," by Maxime Garcia (of the University of Zurich) and Andrea Ravignani (of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics), we find out that "dishonest signaling" -- using a voice that makes you sound bigger or more threatening than you actually are -- has been found in dozens of mammalian species.

The authors write:

Vocal production learning (VPL) can be defined as the experience-driven ability, rare among mammals, to modify existing vocalizations, to produce novel sounds or to imitate sounds that do not belong to an individual's vocal repertoire...  VPL inherently involves modulation of acoustic features related to the source, filter or both.  Yet, different species have varying degrees of control over the anatomical components involved in phonation.  For instance, despite a generally assumed lack of vocal control some non-human primates might have limited sound production plasticity, including for non-voiced sounds.  While the presence of VPL in non-human primates is debated, strong evidence for VPL has been found to date in humans and four other mammalian clades: non-otariid Pinnipedia, Elephantidae, Chiroptera and Cetacea.

"If you saw a Chihuahua barking as deep as a Rottweiler, you would definitely be surprised," said study co-author Andrea Ravignani, in an interview with Science Daily.  "Nature is full of animals like squeaky-Rottweilers and tenor-Chihuahuas...  Some animals fake their size by developing larger vocal organs that lower their sound, which makes them sound larger than you would expect.  Other animals are good at controlling the sounds they produce.  Such strategies -- 'dishonest signaling' -- could be driven by sexual selection, as males with larger body size or superior singing skills (hitting very high or low notes) attract more females (or vice versa)."

I know one good example of little animal/big voice from my own back yard -- the Carolina Wren (Thryothorus ludovicianus).  It's a tiny thing, what birders call an "LBJ" (Little Brown Job), but its outsized shriek of "TEAKETTLE TEAKETTLE TEAKETTLE" frequently wakes me up at four in the morning during the spring and early summer, especially given that there's one of 'em who likes to sing from the branches of the box elder tree right outside my bedroom window.  But this is volume, not pitch.  For misleading pitch, there's none that can compete -- at least in the bird world -- with the Great Potoo (Nyctibius grandis) of the rainforests of South America.  Take a listen to this:

Since this bird is nocturnal, and (as you can see) is very cryptically colored, a lot of the natives didn't realize that sound was a bird for a long time.  Their explanation -- that there was a horrible monster out there in the forest roaming around at night -- is completely understandable, given what its vocalizations sound like.

So the capacity to create misleading sounds isn't the sole provenance of the Monty Python crew's fake falsettos.  There are lots of animal species that do the same thing, either to frighten off potential predators or to sound sexier for potential mates.

Or, perhaps, to give a misleading answer to questions like, "Are there any women here today?... good, very well then."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is for anyone who likes quick, incisive takes on scientific topics: When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by the talented science writer Jim Holt.

When Einstein Walked with Gödel is a series of essays that explores some of the deepest and most perplexing topics humanity has ever investigated -- the nature of time, the implications of relativity, string theory, and quantum mechanics, the perception of beauty in mathematics, and the ultimate fate of the universe.  Holt's lucid style brings these difficult ideas to the layperson without blunting their scientific rigor, and you'll come away with a perspective on the bizarre and mind-boggling farthest reaches of science.  Along the way you'll meet some of the key players in this ongoing effort -- the brilliant, eccentric, and fascinating scientists themselves.

It's a wonderful read, and anyone who is an aficionado of the sciences shouldn't miss it.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Runners' high

I am deeply ambivalent about running.

On the one hand, while I'm doing it, every fiber of my being is begging me to stop.  I'm short of breath, sweating, my legs ache.  It seems like I'll never be done, that this misery will go on forever.  My brain shouts at me with every step, demanding that I stop, asking me why the hell I'm doing this in the first place.  Voluntarily.  Without even a lion chasing me, or something, some circumstance that would make this reasonable behavior.

Me before the start of a race, experiencing deep ambivalence

However, a part of me craves it.  When I'm driving somewhere and I pass a guy out running, I immediately think, "I wish I was doing that right now."  I always feel better afterwards -- with the possible exception of the Montezuma 5K two years ago, when it was a good 95 F, and about 587% relative humidity.  But even then, when I got home -- and immediately went into my back yard, stripped, and jumped into my pond -- I had to admit I was glad I did it.

And crossing the finish line is itself a huge endorphin rush.  I'm a mediocre runner at best and will never be in contention for the top three slots, or even the top fifty, but when I finish -- usually in the middle of the pack -- I feel like a million bucks.  All the pain and misery are forgotten.  In fact, I have sometimes gone home from races, gotten online, and signed up for several more.

Crossing the finish line at the Fox Trot Trail Race, feeling far less ambivalent

The best part, though, is the racing community.  It's about as far from a cutthroat competition as you can get.  I'd guess the first four or five to cross are probably pushing to get ahead, but everyone else?  I can say that people at races are some of the friendliest folks around.  They honestly want everyone to do his/her best.  I've had people slow down, even turn around, when I'm lagging behind, and ask me if I was okay.  I've done the same for other runners.  The folks who have already finished cheer on the ones who follow them, urging them on to put on a final burst of speed as they approach the finish line, to "finish strong."  Afterwards, the question is never "what was your time?" or "what place did you finish in?", it's "did you have a good race?"

Most memorable was last year's Ithaca Twilight Race -- run on the solstice, when it's still light at nine PM.  It was a muggy evening, and after I finished, I got a bottle of water, plunked down onto the grass, and pulled my sweaty t-shirt off.  Shortly afterwards, a cute kid, maybe ten years old, came up to me with a big grin on his face, and gave me a double high-five.

He said, "Well done, Shirtless Tattoo Guy!"

Turns out I'm not alone in feeling this way.  New research in The Journal of Positive Psychology, just released last week and authored by Marzena Cypryańska and John Nezlek, looked at the attitudes of 404 recreational runners, and found something interesting -- but hardly surprising given my experience.  Not only were runners happier following a race, the high lasted throughout the following week.  They scored higher on just about every measure of well-being, including experiencing more positive emotions, having higher self-esteem and confidence, feeling more satisfied with life, and that their life had more meaning.

What's interesting is that the length of the race -- they looked at 5Ks all the way up to full marathons -- didn't matter.  Neither did what position the runner finished in.  The mere act of participating in a competitive run with a group of supportive people gave test subjects a boost that was remarkably long-lasting.

One thing that did seem to matter was how runners themselves felt about their performance.  If someone thought (s)he had "run well," the boost was significantly higher than if (s)he "didn't have a good race."  Again, it didn't matter where in the standings runners fell; a runner could come in 750th out of 1000, and if she felt like she'd run her best and was satisfied with the outcome, it was just as much of an endorphin rush as the woman who placed in the top fifty -- and a great deal more than the guy who came in #10 but felt like he hadn't done as well as he wanted.

I can vouch for this, too.  Last year, I ran the Trumansburg May Day 5K, and wasn't happy with my performance -- my time was high, my energy level low, and I ended up feeling kind of crummy.  I didn't do terribly -- I beat my time in the aforementioned Montezuma Sauna Race by a good three minutes -- but I just felt as if I hadn't met the standard I was shooting for.

And that cast a bit of gloom over running in general for quite some time afterward.

So the Cypryańska and Nezlek research shows a number of things -- it's important to participate in groups, critical to support each other, and perhaps most of all, necessary to be proud, not disparaging, of your own accomplishment.  After all, wherever you finished, you're still ahead of the people who are sitting on the sidelines.

Now, y'all'll have to excuse me.  I've got some races to sign up for.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is one of personal significance to me -- Michael Pollan's latest book, How to Change Your Mind.  Pollan's phenomenal writing in tours de force like The Omnivore's Dilemma and The Botany of Desire shines through here, where he takes on a controversial topic -- the use of psychedelic drugs to treat depression and anxiety.

Hallucinogens like DMT, LSD, ketamine, and psilocybin have long been classified as schedule-1 drugs -- chemicals which are off limits even for research except by a rigorous and time-consuming approval process that seldom results in a thumbs-up.  As a result, most researchers in mood disorders haven't even considered them, looking instead at more conventional antidepressants and anxiolytics.  It's only recently that there's been renewed interest, when it was found that one administration of drugs like ketamine, under controlled conditions, was enough to alleviate intractable depression, not just for hours or days but for months.

Pollan looks at the subject from all angles -- the history of psychedelics and why they've been taboo for so long, the psychopharmacology of the substances themselves, and the people whose lives have been changed by them.  It's a fascinating read -- and I hope it generates a sea change in our attitudes toward chemicals that could help literally millions of people deal with disorders that can rob their lives of pleasure, satisfaction, and motivation.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Kite flying

A few years ago, I wrote a post here at Skeptophilia called "Grass, gulls, mosquitoes, and mice," in which I laid out the argument that while evolution is usually slow, sometimes it's so fast we can see it happening before our very eyes.  And when that happens, the anti-evolutionists amongst us have some explaining to do.

It's always nice to have another arrow in your quiver, and that came in a recent paper in Nature called, "Rapid Morphological Change of a Top Predator With the Invasion of a Novel Prey," by Christopher E. Cattau, Robert J. Fletcher Jr, Rebecca T. Kimball, Christine W. Miller, and Wiley M. Kitchens, all biologists at the University of Florida, who have been studying Snail Kites, a rare bird of prey found in the Everglades (and, as you'll see, in a few other places).

The Snail Kite, as you might expect from the name, is a specialist predator that feeds only on apple snails, a large species of freshwater gastropod found in the Everglades.  They have hooked beaks for removing the meat from the snail, and taloned feet for holding onto the shell -- well adapted for their niche.

The problem started with the accidental introduction into Florida of the island apple snail (Pomacea maculata), a larger, heavier species native to Argentina.  The native species, the Florida apple snail (Pomacea paludosa), was quickly outcompeted in areas where they both occurred, which concerned not only fans of the Snail Kite but rice farmers, as the island apple snail is a voracious pest on rice crops.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons, photograph by Andy Morffew]

When an exotic species replaces a native species upon which other animals depend for food, the usual result is a drastic blow to the pre-existing food chain.  Here, though, we have a different result -- an eye-opening response by the Snail Kites that recalls evolutionary biologist Alan Grant's comment in Jurassic Park that "nature finds a way."

As is, the Snail Kites in Florida were not equipped to prey upon the island apple snails -- their feet were too small to hold onto the shells, not surprising as the snails are five times larger than the native Florida apple snails.  But the expected drop in the bird's numbers didn't happen.  Instead, in only a couple of generations, selection was so powerful on the population that the average talon size and bill size increased measurably, and the alterations were reflected by changes in their DNA.

"Nobody would believe me," said Robert Fletcher, co-author of the study, when the findings were announced. "They said, 'No, that cannot be. It's too quick.'"  But even the naysayers were convinced when the introduced snail species showed up in huge numbers in one part of the Snail Kite's range, and instead of leaving the premises, nearly all of the nearby kites converged on the spot.

I guess birds like an all-you-can-eat buffet as much as the rest of us do.

The authors write:

[T]rends in predicted breeding values emphasize that recent morphological changes have been driven primarily by phenotypic plasticity rather than micro-evolutionary change.  Our findings suggest that evolutionary change may be imminent and underscore that even long-lived vertebrates can respond quickly to invasive species.  Furthermore, these results highlight that phenotypic plasticity may provide a crucial role for predators experiencing rapid environmental change.

It's good news for the kites, but it bears mention that a lot of times, the introduction of an exotic species can spell disaster for native ones.  The kites were lucky in that there was already a range of bill sizes because of spontaneous mutations, and the new prey acted as a selecting agent, favoring the largest-billed and largest-footed individuals.

The most interesting part is that once you set this in motion, it ultimately will split the population from related populations elsewhere.  I first saw Snail Kites in Belize, where there are no island apple snails, so the pressure to cope with bigger prey doesn't exist.  Given time -- and, apparently, less time than anyone thought -- the population in Belize and the one in Florida will diverge genetically to the point that they will be, by anyone's definition, different species.

So there you have it: another example of evolution in action.  Cool enough for anyone to appreciate, but for evolutionary biologists, this is nothing short of spectacular.  We can add this to the list of times we've actually observed species evolving quickly enough to see it happen -- which is one more nail in the coffin of strict creationism, not that we particularly needed another one.

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Ever wonder why we evolved to have muscles that can only pull, not push?  How about why the proportions of an animals' legs change as you look at progressively larger and larger species -- why, in other words, insects can get by with skinny little legs, while elephants need the equivalent of Grecian marble columns?  Why there are dozens of different takes on locomotion in the animal world, but no animal has ever evolved wheels?

If so, you need to read Steven Vogel's brilliant book Cats' Paws and Catapults.  Vogel is a bioengineer -- he looks at the mechanical engineering of animals, analyzing how things move, support their weight, and resist such catastrophes as cracking, buckling, crumbling, or breaking.  It's a delightful read, only skirting some of the more technical details (almost no math needed to understand his main points), and will give you a new perspective on the various solutions that natural selection has happened upon in the 4-billion-odd years life's been around on planet Earth.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Higher, faster, stronger

I'm of two minds with regards to the Olympics.

Okay, to be fair, I'm of two minds with regards to most things.  More than two minds, sometimes.  My friends have been known to quote Tolkien at me - "Go not to the Elves for advice, for they will say both yes and no."  I can usually argue both sides of any point, often equally persuasively - and can talk myself into almost anything.

Well, except for the whole evolution thing.  I'm pretty rabid about that.  Other than that, I'm kind of ambivalent by nature.

But I digress.

This evening will be the opening ceremonies of the 2012 Summer Olympics, when the most talented athletes will meet in London to being a series of grueling competitions for the gold.  Most of these young men and women have trained all of their lives for this moment, and a tremendous amount rides on success.  You don't get that far without a huge competitive streak -- and the fact that the majority of the participants will not receive a medal is simple mathematics.  So, my question: is the heartbreak worth it?

I still remember watching an event in the 2010 Winter Olympics.  Some friends and I were in a bar following a Cornell hockey game, and the television was tuned in to the women's hockey game between Canada and Slovakia.  Evidently not having had enough opportunities that evening to watch a puck sliding around, I became glued to the set.

When we came in, it was 13-0 in Canada's favor, with 19 minutes to go in the third period.  As I watched, the score finally climbed its way up to 18-0.

I couldn't take my eyes off it.  Besides loving hockey, it was a little like watching a car crash.  You're seeing it, you know it's going to be bad, but you can't take your eyes off it.  That poor Slovakian goalie was powerless to do anything about facing an offense that basically steamrolled her own defense, and one shot after another went in to the net. When the teams lined up to shake hands afterwards, she was in tears.

Don't get me wrong; I like watching skill.  The Canadians were clearly more talented and better trained, and deserved the win.  But the compassionate side of me hates to watch what amounts to an athletic car crash happening, in full view of millions.

This, of course, isn't the only time this sort of thing has happened.  I still remember some years ago when French figure skater Laetitia Hubert was catapulted from 20-some-oddth place into 5th by a flawless short program, and had to go into the finals against the Big Dogs of the likes of Surya Bonaly and Midori Ito.  The poor kid couldn't take the pressure, and completely fell apart.  The tears of amazed joy from the previous day turned into a performance that was acutely painful to watch, as she tried again and again to land jumps that her nerves just wouldn't handle.  It is the only time I've ever seen the camera cut to a commercial break in the middle of someone's performance -- even the network techs couldn't bear to have her humiliation televised.

It's an odd thing, the Olympics.  We watch it to see the best of the best strut their stuff, to see people do what 99% of us couldn't in a hundred years dream of doing ourselves.  When the inevitable happens, and some of them fail, they sometimes do so in such a spectacular fashion that it makes us want to turn away, to pretend it isn't happening, but we know that we will remember these people as much - or perhaps more - than the ones who get the medals.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I'm not against competition per se.  And I think that our current self-esteem obsessed educational establishment's emphasis on making sure that everyone wins is wrong-headed; true self esteem comes from challenging yourself, working hard, and succeeding at something you didn't think you'd be able to do.  But I do have to wonder if extremely high-stakes competition, from medical schools to American Idol to the Olympics, is more destructive than constructive.

I know that the athletes would say -- most of them, anyway -- that it's the mere fact of making the Olympic team, of getting there, that is the most important, and that the medals are secondary.  I only believe that up to a point.  If we set up a contest whose sole aim is to raise the fastest, strongest, and most skilled to the skies, then the ones who fall will always draw our sympathy.  I honestly don't know if the whole Olympic concept is a good thing or a bad; probably some of both.  But for me, the despairing face of Laetitia Hubert, picking herself up off the ice after the sixth bad fall, and the tears on the face of the Slovakian goalie are as much a part of it as is the joy of the gold medalist.  If you want the one, you have to accept the other.