Weekday Reads: Why Scientists Battle To Understand The Natural World
And What They're Learning
Although I frequently stroll through local metro parks and have taken a few long and beautiful hikes in my past, I’m glad there are others willing to spend weeks and even years, trekking in far flung, dangerous locales searching for “the origin” of our collective species. I am grateful to the prize-winning paleontologists and myriad other scientists who spend their time observing our natural world, and digging, sifting, scraping and collecting the earth and water to test in their laboratories, so we can can better understand, and then hopefully, preserve our planet.
These readings may seem like a departure from writing about poverty, but when you feel the passion of these scientists to learn, and their eagerness to use that knowledge to improve our natural world, you will see that their discoveries ultimately enrich us all. And not just metaphorically. For example, much of the destruction of the Amazon’s rainforests comes from the desire (not need) to graze cattle for meat production. A better understanding of how humans and other species adapt over time, should demonstrate to us how to feed our increasing population without depleting large swaths of land crucial to our survival.
In that vein, I’d like to share a few, long and winding articles that show, that although we are probably past the tipping point vis-a-vis climate change, it is likely not technology alone that will pull us back from the edge of destruction, but the deeper understanding of how all species have been created and then changed in response to their environment. New or improved green energy technologies won’t hurt either, but they might well be based on these evolutionary discoveries.
— First up is a CNN profile of evolutionary biologist, Dolph Schluter, which discusses his decades of research in the Galápagos Islands and his British Columbia research center. He has been able to document how a species evolves in response to change of some kind; for example, the case of a specific species of Finch in the Galapagos which evolved the size and shape of their beaks in response to competition for food.
The application of this research can show us how different species might adapt to climate change.
For Darwin, evolution was largely a thought experiment inspired by what he saw in nature, but Schluter’s work, in the field and in the lab, has revealed and fleshed out the ecological mechanisms that drive the creation of new species.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/30/world/dolph-schluter-profile-crafoord-prize-scn/index.html
— A New Yorker profile of paleobotanist, Else Marie Friis takes us on her lifelong search to document the earth’s earliest “fossilized flowering plants”. Again, decades of both field and lab work come together to give us a new perspective on evolution. Friis’ work used both a new scientific approach and a different way of seeing the same evidence to demonstrate that flowering plants followed the same, slow, meticulous path of evolution as later species. In fact, these ancient plants laid the groundwork for the species of the modern world to evolve and thrive from its “increasingly abundant pollen, fruits, and seeds”.
When Friis placed them [black specs found sifting though dirt and rock in Sweden] under a microscope, she saw a whole range of flowers, from unopened buds to mature blossoms, that dated to around eighty million years ago. “We understood that it was something special,”…
— Finally for this evening, a wild, New York Times story of a 17 year old girl’s survival, alone in the Amazon, and the lasting legacy of biological research she and her parents collected in their workstations deep in the Peruvian jungle. Their research, among many others, shows the near endless biodiversity of the rainforests, and how that knowledge can help the world learn the importance of preserving it.
“Much of her [biologist Juliane Diller’s] administrative work involves keeping industrial and agricultural development at bay. She estimates that as much as 17 percent of Amazonia has been deforested,… ‘After 20 percent, there is no possibility of recovery,’ Dr. Diller said, grimly. “You could expect a major forest dieback and a rather sudden evolution to something else, probably a degraded savanna. That would lead to a dramatic increase in greenhouse gas emissions, which is why the preservation of the Peruvian rainforest is so urgent and necessary.”
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I’d love to hear your thoughts on these articles, and the scientists who led decades of research which guide us today. Please leave a comment below!
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