Tuesday, March 10, 2015
Sunday, October 12, 2014
Saturday, March 1, 2014
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Of course, this doesn't keep her from buying new books, and occasionally I select one of her leftovers to be my "new" book. Recently, Mrs. Arch purchased Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan. She hated it--Taleb is a pompous asshole, and his attitude makes it difficult to take his ideas seriously. She didn't think I'd want to bother with the book, and I didn't really disagree. I don't find philosophy or economics interesting, and from what I could tell, the book seemed to be some sort of combination of both. Taleb argues that some entities (including some cultural and natural systems) are made stronger by exposure to stress, and that we're doing ourselves a disservice by trying to remove all stressors from our environments. Mrs. Arch told me that Taleb uses evolution as an example, and that's something I am interested in, so I decided to give the book a look.
I started with the "Prologue," and that was pretty much enough. Mrs. Arch was exactly right--Taleb is a blowhard anti-intellectual who started setting up "Soviet-Harvard" strawmen in the first couple of pages. This kind of irritation, I don't need. I thought, however, I'd at least read his thoughts on evolution, and not too surprisingly, he gets it wrong. Taleb shows a basic misunderstanding of the way that evolution operates; he makes the common mistake of thinking of evolution as some sort of progressive process that works to produce stronger species (although he does at least understand that natural selection works on populations, not individuals). Taleb believes that exposure to stress--in this case, any change in the environment--works to remove organisms that are less "fit" from the gene pool (he also understands the difference between genes and organisms, but in this case it makes very little difference). However, he conflates genetic fitness and resilience. The way that evolutionary biologists use the term "fitness" has nothing necessarily to do with how strong or smart or fast an animal is, and simply indicates the ability of an organism to get its genes into the next generation. Natural selection works by a winnowing-down process; those genes not well-adapted to a particular environment are reduced in number in subsequent generations, and eventually removed from the gene pool. This does not, as Taleb argues, make a species more resilient, but less so. The resilience of a species is based on its genetic variation; any reduction in that variation makes the species more susceptible to extinction if there is a change in the environment.
Evolution--specifically, selection--may be thought of as a "honing" process. It fits a population to its environment, and results in some of the spectacular physical adaptations that we see in nature--the intricate beauty of a spider web, or the lovely curve of the wing of an albatross. But those adaptations come with a price, and that price is the loss of genetic variation that would allow those organisms to deal with major disruptions of their environments. Conversely, a lack of stress allows the retention of genetic variation that might be less favorable under current environmental conditions, but that might come in handy if the environment suddenly changes in a completely "unexpected" way. For example, Peter Grant and his crew demonstrated that the beak size of Darwin's finches in the Galapagos tended to fluctuate with rainfall; when times are tough, beak sizes that are best adapted to deal with the hardiest seeds are selected, and intermediate sizes begin to disappear. When times are good, and there are many types of seeds, intermediately sized bills remain in the population. It's not too difficult to come up with a scenario in which the intermediate bills become the most beneficial, but if a long period of low rainfall has removed all those genes from the population, there are no birds with the "fittest" bill size. In other words, stress has made the population less resilient than it would have otherwise been.
I didn't read any more of Taleb's book. If he doesn't understand evolution, why should I trust his ideas about culture or the economy? I have plenty of books from 2002 in the back room, and I have every reason to think that there's at least a chance that the authors knew what they were talking about.
Monday, June 25, 2012
Shed a tear, if you will for Lonesome George, age unknown but around a hundred, who passed away yesterday in his home in the Galapagos Islands. George was a Pinta Island tortoise (Chelonoidis nigra abingdoni), the last known specimen of his kind. He was found on Pinta Island in 1971, and relocated for his own safety to a pen in a national park. Attempts to mate him with females of closely related subspecies were, not too unsurprisingly, unsuccessful.Why should you care about George? After all, he was just a turtle, albeit a famous, well-loved, 200-pound turtle. He wasn’t even particularly handsome, even for a turtle. If I can’t convince you that an obscure subspecies of turtle is important, or that George was a living creature, and as such deserves just a smidgen of respect, perhaps you’ll agree that George can stand as a symbol for a lot of last-of-his-kind animals to whom we’ve bade farewell. In 1914, the last passenger pigeon, called Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo (not bad enough that she was the last of her kind, but she also had to spend her waning years in Cincinnati). Benjamin, the last thylacine (a marsupial wolf-like creature) died in the Hobart Zoo in Tasmania in 1936. Saddest (to a grouse researcher like me) was Booming Ben, the last-of-his-kind heath hen, who died in Martha’s Vineyard after spending his last four years calling in vain for a mate. His cause of death is officially unknown, but you and I know that he died of a broken heart. What happened to these animals? Why did they disappear? Some will suggest that they lost in the big game of evolution, that they were unable to adapt and so vanished, and rightly so. Don’t you believe it. In the 1700s and 1800s, passenger pigeons may have been the most numerous animal on earth. During colonial times, heath hens were so common that people looking for work would bargain with prospective employers to have an upper limit on the number of times per week they could be fed the tasty birds. Other now-extinct animals, such as Carolina parakeets and great auks, leave behind similar stories of their prodigious numbers. These animals, and others like them, had existed for tens or hundreds of thousands of years in immense populations. What happened to them was us. Human interference, beginning with our first ancestors to stumble out of Africa, changed the habitats where these animals spent uncounted eons evolving. Thylacines were hunted out of existence beginning with the first few people who landed in Australia. Heath hens depended on (wait for it…) heaths; as these were converted to cropland and cities, the birds had no place to do their elaborate mating dances. Passenger pigeons may have been doomed by the destruction of a single large forest where the bulk of the population reproduced. George’s Pinta Island tortoises were condemned when feral goats destroyed the native vegetation on his island. We have hunted, harassed, poisoned, and shot hundreds of species out of existence. We’ve destroyed innumerable acres of habitat, converting it to croplands, or grazing land, or Wal-Mart parking lots. Where we haven’t outright destroyed habitat, we’ve fragmented it into uselessness, or polluted it with pesticides, or introduced pests, parasites, competitors, or predators that don’t belong where we’ve put them. The coup de grace may well be climate change; as the earth warms animals are forced north, or to higher elevations, and there’s only so far up an animal can go, and he can’t take the plants he needs with him. Again, what do you care? Aren’t we doing just fine without heath hens and ivory-bills? Doesn’t my car run just fine without any help from Steller’s sea cows? What does a golden toad have to do with me? Honestly, the last Chaco azul pupfish probably died without impacting you negatively. But we can’t really be sure. It turns out that the environment is made up of millions of species all linked together in complex webs of interdependence that ecologists are only beginning to understand. Perhaps you could think of the ecosystem as a huge Jenga game, and we’ve pulled out an awful lot of pieces. And there are a lot of pieces just on the verge of being pulled out. A quarter of the world’s birds are considered threatened or endangered. That doesn’t mean that three-quarters are in good shape, either; for many species of birds, nobody has studied whether or not their populations are stable. Reptiles, mammals, and especially amphibians are in similar straits. So, this evening, drink a toast to George, the last of his kind. But not the last last-of-his-kind that we’ll hear about.