In the last fortnight, I saw one long-gestating project finally published, and got to be a small part of the publication of what’s arguably the biggest-ever study of adaptive evolution. I subjected an SUV full of students to a botany-themed playlist on the way to a walk through Joshua tree woodlands; and spent a big part of Monday afternoon guiding some of those same students through keying out some lovelyspring-bloomingplants. My university also formally invested a new President, so I spent a big chunk of my Monday morning dressed like I was going to preside over court. The natural world is flowering, campus is as busy as I’ve seen it in ages, and science is actually getting done in the sense that it’s “done” when it’s published. Is this … normality?
Anyway here’s some of what I’ve been reading, recently:
It’s now two weeks since I resumed in-person teaching, and so far, so good. It’s shockingly refreshing to actually interact with students directly, even with everyone masked, and to be able to just improvise with a specimen picked up on a walk around the campus. And field trips are back! There’s war in Europe (and the U.S. is at sort-of-but-not-war with Russia?) and the IPCC has dropped a huge list of things we need to do to cope with coming climate change but on Saturday I guided a bunch of students through keying out Ceanothus spinosus at the side of a trail in the Santa Monica Mountains. We might not be out of the woods yet, but we’re in different woods.
The Mojave Desert, south of Boulder City, Nevada (jby)
Fieldwork in the spring is always a bit tricky, but I’ve fortunately been able to put my teaching commitment aside for a week to help plant Joshua tree seedlings in an ongoing experiment in climate adaptation. It was a scramble to get things set up and get myself out the door to drive into the desert; and it’ll be a scramble to catch up when I get back into town. But in the moment, I’m out in the wind under the open sky, with a pallet of tiny delicate plants that need to be tucked into the ground.
It’s been an eventual two weeks in evolutionary biology. Meanwhile, I’ve somehow kept a lab-field course on track with minimal in person engagement, planned a bit for actual fieldwork in a couple weeks from now, and started wrangling a couple hundred freshly sequenced genomes.
And I managed to take notes on a little reading, too:
Update, February 1, 2022: Less than a week after I published this post, Stacy Farina — an evolutionary biologist at Howard University — and her husband Matthew Gibbons published an extensive look through E. O. Wilson’s correspondence with, and active support for, J. Philippe Rushton, one of the most outspoken race scientists of recent decades. If you’re finding this post for the first time, I’d ask you to start by reading what Farina and Gibbons found in Wilson’s archived papers. It is much uglier than I knew when I wrote this, and it really forces a re-evaluation of the ways in which I’d given Wilson the benefit of the doubt — the correspondence reveals he was quite committed to advancing the goals of race science.
I grew up in the Mennonite Church, a sort of next-level Protestant Christian tradition. (In cartoonish brief: Ulrich Zwingli rebelled against the Roman Catholic Church; the spiritual ancestors of Mennonites rebelled against Zwingli.) Mennonites practice adult baptism, holding that only an informed adult can meaningfully choose to follow their beliefs. One thing that people know about Mennonites, if they know anything, is that this doctrine means Mennonites take church membership — who’s an active part of a congregation, who isn’t on the rolls — very seriously.
In “old order” congregations, and the theologically-adjacent Amish church, this manifests as “shunning”, in which a baptized church member who stops adhering to the church’s beliefs is cut out of the social life of the congregation. The degree of that cutting off varies with tradition. It can mean complete separation from fellow congregationalists and family, even to the point of refusing to communicate; it can mean that the “shunned” person simply can’t join in church ceremonies. In the branch of the tradition I grew up in, it meant my family’s pastor — who, to 11-year-old me, was like a beloved uncle who was also the Metatron — drove from rural central Pennsylvania to Chicago to let a daughter of the church know that she’d lost her membership when she moved in with her girlfriend. I still haven’t forgiven him for that.
All of this is to say that I know a little bit about social sanctions. I think about that every time I see my fellow evolutionary biologists grapple with how to approach people who believe our scientific work supports their vision of genetically determined racial supremacy.
Rose Main Reading Room, New York Public Library (Flickr: saebaryo)
The period between semesters is supposed to be quiet. I’ve been mentally dumping things to do into this one — paper revisions, reviewing service, analysis of long-awaited new data, a first draft of a new grant, writing my (eek) application for tenure — since at least October. But SARS-CoV-2 had other plans.
I spent the first week after campus reopened in the New Year watching the number of COVID exposure alerts sent to faculty mount up until the number of buildings on campus with a reported case was greater on the first workday after the break than the peak we hit during fall Finals Week, when students flocked back for in-person exams. Pretty soon after that we got word (via the University’s Twitter and then an all-campus email sent with no prior alert to faculty) that the first three weeks of Spring 2022 would be “primarily remote instruction” … but maybe not all of it? And so in between all the other stuff I’ve been trying to figure out how to teach a botany lab from my home office. It’ll be fine, I am telling myself.
In the midst of all that, here’s what I’ve read recently:
Molecular Ecology and Molecular Ecology Resources are looking for new Editorial Board members to join the journals as Associate Editors in the key subject areas below:
Broad genomic resources including genome assembly. Experience with plant genomes would be advantageous
Microbial ecology/community ecology
Microbiome research/coevolution
Epigenetics
Nominations and personal applications are welcome, and whilst scientific qualifications are paramount, we would particularly appreciate nominations and applications from suitably qualified researchers in underrepresented groups, including women, ethnic minority scientists, and scientists with disabilities, among others. Please email nominations/applications by February 15th, 2022 to manager.molecol@wiley.com with the following items:
Cover letter stating the reasons for your nomination, of if applying for yourself, your interest in the role and familiarity with the journals,
Abbreviated CV (Education, Publications, Outreach) if you have it.
It’s a new year, and while many of the challenges of 2020 and 2021 don’t show any sign of letting up, I’m trying to pick up some habits that fell by the wayside while I juggled fully online semesters and social distancing via fieldwork. One of those is good old fashioned blogging. Writing briefly about the papers I’m reading and the scientific concepts I’m mulling has been part of my scholarly process since graduate school. Over two years of the COVID-19 pandemic I’ve alternated between feeling like I had no spare time for blogging and feeling like I had no capacity for blogging — but I’ve felt the absence of the practice.
So, here’s one starting point: I’m going to begin posting roundups of the preprints and papers I’ve recently read, with brief reactions. Expect these every other week or so, with adjustments in frequency depending on my personal bandwidth. A paper’s inclusion in these posts will not constituted any kind of endorsement other than “this caught my attention long enough to download the PDF”, as perhaps this first batch will demonstrate.
Without further ado, here’s what I’ve read recently:
(A) A small, plankton-hunting larva, also known as a planktotroph; (B) A large larva or lecithotroph, that has no appendages; (C) and (D) are two examples of larvae with intermediate phenotypes between (A) and (B). Photographs taken at 20X magnification by Conor Gilligan, a graduate student in the Rockman lab.
The following is a guest post by Ornob Alam, a graduate student in Michael Purugganan’s lab at New York University. Ornob’s PhD projects examine the demographic and evolutionary history of domesticated Asian rice in the context of past climate change and human migrations; he is on Twitter as @genomeinquirer.
Female ocean sunfish release up to 300 million eggs into the water during spawning to be met by similarly large numbers of sperm released by the males. This marks the end of their parental investment, leaving newly fertilized offspring to fend for themselves and mostly die. The ocean sunfish reproductive strategy stands in stark contrast to our own, where the offspring first develops inside the mother and parents pour extensive resources into raising a small number of offspring to adulthood.
How did animals come to have such divergent life histories? This question is deeply entwined with inquiries into the evolution of novel modes of post-fertilization development, and at the heart of a recent study in Evolution that explored the genetic bases of different modes of development occurring in a single species of marine worms.
Matt Rockman, a co-author of the study, first began studying these worms – called Streblospio benedicti – in his lab at New York University in 2008. It is one of many species of worms he studies to address various evolutionary questions.
Forested mountainsides in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest (Photo by Jeremy Yoder)
The following is a guest post by Erin Zess, a Postdoctoral Researcher with the MOI Lab in the Department of Plant Biology at the Carnegie Institution for Science. Erin is on Twitter at @ZessingAround.
The Molecular Ecologist receives a small commission for purchases made on Bookshop.org via links from this post.
The Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin, whose ancestral lands extended over 10 million acres across the Great Lakes region, call themselves “Maeqtekuahkíhkíw Kew Kanâhwíhtahquaq,” which translates to “The Forest Keepers.” The land ethic of the Tribe — articulated by Chief Oshkosh over two centuries ago, before the arrival of professional forestry in North America — is to: “Start with the rising sun and work towards the setting sun, but take only the mature trees, the sick trees, and the trees that have fallen. When you reach the end of the reservation, turn and cut from the setting sun to the rising sun and the trees will last forever.” Living by this dictum, the Menominee Tribe has sustainably managed their remaining Tribal lands, 235,560 acres, for over 150 years. In that time, they have harvested the entire volume of the forest twice over and, today, the forest volume is greater than when timber harvesting began.
Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology in the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Forestry, is another kind of forest keeper. Simard’s research focuses on the function, distribution, and ecological impact of the belowground fungal networks that connect trees in robust forests, and her work has helped shift the mainstream Western perspective on forest systems towards understanding them as cooperative and connected. In her new book, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (Vintage, $17.00 in paperback), Simard recounts her journey from her family’s homestead in British Columbia, through her early career at a timber company and in the Canadian Forest Service, to her current position in academia, describing how her work has brought her, “full circle to stumble onto some of the indigenous ideals: diversity matters.”
