On heroes in Academia

Two common topics on the blog, the information explosion and setting goals as a young scientist, come together in the discussion of heros. Although the term may sound antiquated, much of science is about finding apt metaphors and making connections. I think having a set of folks whose character and accomplishments are models can be immensely helpful when setting your own life goals.

That said, identifying and emulating heros is a tricky business. Imagine finding a role model 1000 years ago. He or she likely lived in your neighborhood and was thus a sample of perhaps 500 people. Nowadays we live on a planet of 6,000,000,000+ people, virtually all connected by a complex social/electronic web. This guarantees two things: 1) The truly exceptional people will be a lot farther out on the distribution of traits than they were when the planet held only millions, and 2) We find them and celebrate them. As a consequence, the notion of emulating these folks is a sure recipe for neurosis: there are only so many Nobel’s and Pulitizers to hand out. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t use these folks to help set our own course.

One such role model whose interests are amply reflected in this blog is E. O. Wilson, for which Amanda Leigh Haag has a nice profile in SEED magazine. Wilson’s life work reflects a number of themese that any young scientist could profitably contemplate.

1) A feeling for the organism. Wilson knows his ants, and has used this knowledge to make groundbreaking contributions in fields as diverse as physiology, behavior, biodiversity, and systematics. His essay Systematics Ascending from In Search of Nature highlights this philosophy of integrated biology starting with an intimate knowledge of a taxon.

2) Reading and thinking broadly. In a similar vein, poking your nose over the fence to consider other disciplines and philosophies makes you a better thinker. Consilience is Wilson’s vision of the ultimate rapprochement between science and the humanities. Written from the viewpoint of a hardcore scientific rationalist, such a synthesis would never come from someone whose nose rarely left the journal Insectes Sociaux.

3) The role of scientist as teacher. We have discussed earlier the difficulty of changing minds, the need for multiple approaches in doing so, and the vital role the scientific community must play in some of the titanic struggles that lie ahead. Wilson’s most recent book The Creation is written as an open and frank discussion with a Southern Baptist pastor on the glories of the earth’s biodiversity and the need to conserve it. When much of the back and forth on the web is about denigrating other viewpoints, Wilson uses his own background to search for common ground.

4) Choose your collaborators wisely. Find folks whose skills complement your own. Here is one of my underlined quotes from Naturalist, one of the great autobiographies of the past few decades:

I am a poor mathematician. At Harvard as a tenured professor in my early thirties I sat through two years of formal courses in mathematics to remedy my deficiency, but with little progress…I have no taste for the subject. I have succeeded to some extent in theoretical model building by collaborating with mathematical theoreticians of the first class. They include, in successive periods of my research, William Bossert, Robert MacArthur, George Oster, and Charles Lumsden. My role was to suggest problems to be addressed, to combine my intuition with theirs, and to lay out empirical evidence unknown to them. They were my intellectural prosthesis and I theirs.

5) Quality = design * content. When I am about to begin a difficult writing project, I will sometimes pull down a volume from one of three writers to gain a bit of inspiration: John Steinbeck, John McPhee, and E. O. Wilson. All are naturalists, all write with grace, concision, and elegance, but only one studies ants.

Brown Food Web Friday–Basiceros, the dirty ant

One of the great things about grubbing around in the litter of a tropical forest are all the odd ways, one finds, that creatures make a living. Taking the lemons (in a world that is, literally, rotting all around you) and making lemonade.

This is Basiceros manni (larger photo here), a slow moving predator that lives in tiny colonies of about 20 or so, nesting in soggy twigs and bits of rotten wood. Although it will eat a variety of insects in the lab, in the field it’s developed quite a taste for snails. Which suits its general habit quite nicely, as this thing pokes along at a snails pace and, if disturbed will curl up into a ball, armadillo like. A very crusty armadillo.

You see, Basiceros’s is covered with long modified spoon shaped hairs (see below) that, are great at gathering dirt, and up-close hairs resembling a frazzled feather that are dandy at holding the dirt close to the body. As a consequence, a nice young female leaving the nest (remember, ants are female collectives that only produce males for the sperm) will, over time, grow to resemble a clod of dirt (albeit one a fairly charming one).

We used to think Basiceros was rare. Now we know to be patient, look carefully, and wait for the aroma of escargot.

Catching, and holding attention–the biophilia effect

E. O. Wilson popularized the term biophilia to refer to our innate attraction to the diversity of the natural world. For me, some form of genetic hardwiring allowing our ancestors to see the subtle distinctions between two plants–one poisonous, one not–seems pretty much a given. However, being an ecologist, I’m not exactly neutral on this as 1) I think preserving the earth’s biodiversity is a pretty reasonable thing to do, and 2) I’ve grown up making such distinctions, progressing from bugs, then herps, then birds, and onto ants.

However, one of the strongest arguments for the biophilia hypothesis is not that you find naturalists wherever you go. Ask a college freshman to name 10 species, let alone 10 species of bird, and you find most struggling after five or six (a disturbing number forget Homo sapiens). The best evidence is that among these very same students, one can recognize every release of the Ford Mustang, one collects lady head vases, and another can give a spontaneous lecture on the subtle variations in, and performance of, the WW II fighter, the P-51 Mustang. Given the incredible accumulation of facts such obsessions demand, and the relative unimportance of Ford Mustangs to our ancestors on the plains of Africa, the most reasonable hypothesis is that this whole “collecting” thing is best understood as displaced biophilia. IOW, if you grew up in suburban North America, you likely saw more species of cars than birds, and were predisposed to obsess about the former. (OK, cars were probably more linked to your fitness, as they were your predators when you were young, and offered reproductive opportunities when you were a bit older, but you get my general point).

I have never seen a better illustration of displaced biophilia than this pseudobiological poster describing the relative sizes of every Starship from the annals of science fiction, from the Enterprise (Constitution Class), to the Borg collective’s assimilation cube, to the Galactic Empire’s (Executer Class). It is gorgeous, as all good depictions of scaling relationships can be. That is just happens to thrill the sci-fi geek, is not, as they say, a bug, but a feature.

If you want to catch someone’s attention, exploit their biophilia.  Place a bunch of subtly different objects in front of them, scaled appropriately, and let them play “one of these things is not like the other“.