“Since 1995, the median number of natural history-related courses required for a BS degree in biology in US courses has been zero. Zilch. Zip. In other words, the people society depends on to know the most about life — people with college biology degrees — in nearly all cases have no obligation to learn anything about actual living organisms. To me, this is a shocking dereliction.”  — Jennifer Frazer 

This quote underlines a sad trend in science education. Rather than understanding whole organisms, their populations, and how they interact with each other and with other whole organisms, the emphasis in education and in research is increasingly on genetic sequences and computer models.

To be clear, recent advances in genetics, uncovering how organisms are related to each other at a molecular scale, and how we can engineer vaccines to protect us from pandemics, are huge in both understanding the tree of life and for protecting our health. Increasingly sophisticated computer models are allowing us to identify what a future may hold if human generated greenhouse gasses are not dramatically reduced. But without knowledge of the sensitivity and risk such projections imply to whole organisms and populations, we are handcuffed in our effort to put these breakthroughs into a context of what they mean to life on this planet, including us.

This argument goes back decades. E.O Wilson, a noted author, entomologist, and naturalist, and James Watson, who along with Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin, discovered the structure of the DNA molecule, were both professors in the biology department at Harvard University. They were both members of committees that determined how departmental funds would be spent, and who would be the next professors hired. Wilson wanted some funds dedicated to maintaining and contributing to the collections within the world class natural history museum housed at Harvard University. He also wanted at least some of the newly hired professors to have research programs that include aspects of natural history, of whole organisms and populations. Watson, full of the hubris generated by recently winning a Nobel Prize (which he shared with Crick but blatantly excluded Franklin), wanted just the opposite. He wanted a biology department in his image, focused on the study of the molecules of life, not anything to do with dusty museum specimens. Watson won, part of a trend in all universities ever since. 

In the physical sciences, if you truly understand the structure of the atoms and molecules you can “reverse engineer” that structure to be able to predict characteristics of the metals or crystals those atoms, those protons, electrons, and neutrons will create. The term to describe this is reductionism; by reducing the elements to their smallest component parts, you can then predict how they could be combined to create better medicines, better building materials, and so forth. However, reducing elements to their smallest component parts can not tell you how a lizard, a bird, or a flower will look and smell, and interact with other things that are alive. We still need people who understand how to study whole organisms (i.e., naturalists). To be clear, part of doing any sort of science involves attempting to reducing complex problems and interactions into the most basic cause and effect relationships, but that does not, in the case of whole organisms, mean reductionism to the atomic or even subatomic levels.  

Another argument the reductionists sometimes make is that the whole organism scientists, the naturalists, have been at it, doing their science ever since Darwin, so all the important whole organism questions have been asked and answered. If that were true, we would then know how climate change will impact plant pollinators, which lizards will survive a which will go extinct, and how habitable our planet will be if we don’t do something right now. We can make guesses, create hypotheses, but creatures are very good at surprising us.

A case in point: Most animals move two dimensionally, forward or backward, left or right. Birds, bats, and flying insects add a third dimension: up and down. Think of the massive amount of technology necessary to enable an airliner to fly from point A to point B, including landing and take offs, and navigation systems. Then fit the analogs of that technology into the brain of a bird. That should create awe. For many years scientists assumed that, as small as a bird’s brain is, that once all that flight technology analog is in place, that there could not be much room left for solving unique problems. The term “bird brain” was never meant to describe the smartest person in the room.

Then scientists tested that dogma. As described in Jennifer Ackerman’s book “The Genius of Birds," birds, or at least some birds (particularly jays, crows, and ravens – all in the family Corvidae) do in fact reach genius levels. Ackerman describes experiments conducted on New Caledonia Crows (not sure whether they are particularly smart crows or that New Caledonia, an island in the southwest Pacific, is just a nice place to do research). The scientists first presented the crows with a clear plexiglass box with a peanut in it and only one way to get to the peanut. Even the dumbest crows quickly solved that one. But then the scientists created ever more complex ways of getting to the peanut: locked doors, the need to build tools from novel items to then unlock the doors. I forget the most complex problem presented to the crows, but it required something like a dozen independent steps that had to be completed in an exact order to reach the peanut prize. Monkeys couldn’t solve that level of problem, probably most (human) teenagers couldn’t solve that level of problem, but the crows did. Reducing a crow to its component atoms would never allow you to predict that level of genius.

Another piece of bird dogma is that most of them can’t smell. Their brains are small and the olfactory lobe of their brain is particularly small. The exceptions are some vultures, especially turkey vultures. Turkey vultures can smell a small, chicken-sized carcass underneath a thick forest canopy miles and miles away. Some other vultures apparently just keep their eye on the turkey vultures, and when the TVs begin descending to a carcass the other vultures try to beat them to it. There are also kiwis, a flightless, worm-eating bird native to New Zealand. Their nose is at the end of a long, thin, curved bill, and they can smell whether an earthworm is near when they thrust their bill into the soil. After those, the list of birds known to have a sense of smell is short, but scientists just added another. Thanks to an article passed along to me from Certified Naturalist Cathy Wiley, I just learned that scientists have found a strong sense of smell in a group of birds that at first blush would be the most unlikely candidates. What birds have mastered aerial acrobatics in those three dimensions better than any other, birds that are also the smallest, with the smallest brains and so no extra space for added “technology"? Yep, hummingbirds.

The scientists found that hummingbirds can smell which flowers have nectar and can even smell if ants might be present – and so are able to effectively search out the best most nectar-filled flowers and avoid flowers where ants might hop onto the hummingbirds and potentially sting them. Reducing a hummingbird to its component atoms would never allow you to predict that level of olfactory acuity. 

Nullius in verba

Go outside, tip your hat to a chuckwalla (and a cactus), think like a mountain, and be safe.