Emergence

Termite mound: Example of an emergence system.
(borrowed from getintravel.com)

The book I read for book club this month touched on something called emergence. And because it's so interesting to me I thought instead of trying to incorporate it into my book review I'd write a separate blog about.
Emergence has come up briefly in a couple other books I've read recently, and I'm pretty fascinated by it at the moment.(Like I was with strange attractors a couple years ago;) But what is it? To borrow the definition from Wikipedia emergence is:
"...the way complex systems and patters arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple reactions."
What this means is that in many systems patterns will begin to emerge that could not be predicted beforehand by looking at any single component of the whole system. Saying it another way, emergence is the production of a pattern or a complex systems by many individual components that could never create anything on their own. Moreover, the system cannot work unless all of the components are in place. It's slightly more complicated than just that, since to create emergent properties a specific amount of energy must be added to the system, but I'll try to explain that below. This is a really cool thing, so I'm going to take a minute to give a couple examples.
Sand ripples: If you look at the components that form sand ripples in the bottom of a lake or ocean you have: Water, wave action (i.e. your energy source), and sand grains. If you  look closely at a sand grain, or a molecule of water, it is unlikely that you could predict how they could ever organize themselves into coherent rows of ripples. But they do. The thing is, they only do it when the right amount of energy (i.e. waves) are present. Too little energy and they will not form. Too much (think big crashing storm waves) and the ripples will be destroyed. But just the right amount, and suddenly sand grains can organize themselves into ripple patterns. Cool right?
Termite nests: This works for hives as well. The components to these systems are earth and millions of individual insects. The energy to the system is how much work each individual can do. Now if you took a single termite and inspected it closely you'd never guess that it could build a mound twenty feet tall. It doesn't even know how to "build"! And you'd be right, a single termite can't build a mound. Even several hundred couldn't, but a few million can, and do. A bunch of individually simple termites can build gigantic mounds taller than a giraffe!
The human brain: Same thing. Your components are individual neurons, and of course the energy comes from the food you eat. If you look at a single neuron you can see how it basically works, but it can't create complex thought...or even simple thought for that matter. All it can do is send and receive chemical signals. You can't make a "sort of brain" with a few hundred neurons. You need a whole skull full of them, all connected together, to be able to think, and learn and know. A brain is not a neuron, a brain is an intricately connected assemblage of many neurons that when acting together produce thoughts and regulate body functions.
So why is this important and interesting to me? This subject of emergence is critical for the transition from non-living to living. The primary reason being that it explains how the evolution of life was able to occur and not conflict with the second law of thermodynamics (i.e.entropy of a system never decreases). To be clear, technically nothing gets around the second law, so ultimately everything does increase in entropy. But small isolated systems like termite mounds, or shallow shore lines, or human brains, can under the right circumstances, for a time, produce amazing and complex things. Using only specific quantities of energy, and relatively simple parts amazing patterns and functions quite literally emerge! I think that is so cool.
Anyway, I'm probably not explaining this super well, but it's my hope that if you find this subject interesting, you will look it up and do some reading on your own! I am sure there are authors out there who have done a much better job than me. On is Dr. Robert Hazen who wrote the book Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origin that I read for book club this month.

The Voyage of the Beagle

A young Charles Darwin

I just finished reading Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle. It was an excellent book, and I am more convinced than ever that I should have been born what Victorian England termed a "gentleman scholar". Darwin spent five years exploring, observing, noting, recording, pondering and contemplating everything from weather patterns, to mating rituals of insects. His job was basically to "check out" South America, and learn as much as he could about as much as possible. Awesome!
The book seemed a little daunting at first, both because of the small text and large stature, and because of some of the Latin names of things that seemed to jump off the pages as I flipped through it. But neither proved to be a detriment. The book was pleasant enough that I actually enjoyed the length of it, and it was divided into chapters that were easily readable in a sitting. Secondly, most of the Latin names were either accompanied by the more familiar one, or it turned out not to be that important. For example if he was talking about a certain kind of beetle or coral I found that most of the time it was more of an inventory and thus not important what genus or species it was. The same went for most of the birds. I could look things up when I found them particularly interesting, but most of the time it wasn't necessary.
I also got to "know" Darwin a little through his own voice. I guess because of my religious background I'd grown up with the vague impression that he was a trouble maker, subversive and sneaky, and somehow a bad person. Even after I became an adult and came to understand the truth about evolution and natural selection, and read about Darwin, I still thought of him as a rebel, an outspoken "go-against-the-grain" kind of guy. But boy-oh-boy was I wrong! He (and I mean the "he" that I can know through his writings) was the opposite of pretty much every thought I've ever had about him. He was quiet, kind, polite, sensitive and humble. He was thoughtful, observant, and ultra-sympathetic to all animals (except maybe fleas) both human and non. He loved nature, and life, and the mysteries of the earth. He was adventurous, and inquisitive, and at the time he wrote The Voyage of the Beagle, clearly religious to a certain degree. The last part was especially surprising since I kind of assumed he was sort of anti-religious. But not so.
Anyway, he just seems like a really decent human being. And I think it's unfortunate that such an admirable man has acquired such a bad rap from some religious circles.
My next book by him (since I am trying to go through them in more or less chronological order) will be On the Origin of Species. I am already sensing the difficulty with which he wrote it, on account of his nature, and his sensitivity to those around him. I know from other accounts that his wife was very religious, and I know that he (Darwin) seemed always to take great care in not offending anyone. It should be interesting!
As a naturalist and scientist he is clearly admirable, and his contribution to science is almost unfathomable. Only now I am starting to think that the human being he simply was is also worthy of our admiration and respect.

John Muir

As is my wont to do, I was aimlessly perusing the bookshelves at the library the other day and came across a compilation of nature essays by the naturalist, and early conservationist John Muir.
This past winter while visiting the Visitors Center in Yosemite Valley I had a chance to look at an exhibit about him, and thought to myself that I should look up some of his writing...it only took me six months!
Anyway, he is a wonderful writer. I especially loved his essays on Yosemite. His writing style is a mix between textbook accuracy and a romance novel (the old-fashioned kind, not the seedy modern ones), and you can really sense the love he had for all things natural and wild, and the gentile, quiet, no-frills kind man that he was. His  flowery way of describing the wilderness is sort of peaceful to read, and is such that I can picture it easily in my mind. The sharp blue of the sky, the specific degree of fluffiness of a squirrels tale, the sound of a  stream as it flowed, all clearly imaginable and at my mental fingertips!
He was a great nature writer, a precursor to the likes of Barry Lopez, and Edward Abbey, and a true lover of the wild. (If you are interested I am sure you could find examples of his essays on the Internet.)
Here are a couple quotes that I jotted down while I was reading two essays about Yosemite. One was about the High Sierra, and the other about the kinds of animals in the Park. Enjoy!

"Former experience had given good reason to know that passionate storms, invisible yet, might be brooding in the calm sungold."


What a fine traveling companion [the creek] it proved to be, what songs it sang, and how passionately it told the mountains own joy!"


"In so wild and so beautiful a region was spent my first day, every sight and sound inspiring, leading one far out of himself, yet feeding and building up his individuality."


"But the darkest scriptures of the mountains are illuminated with bright passages of love that never fail to make themselves felt when one is alone."


"How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains. To behold this alone is worth the pain of any excursion a thousand times over!"

Stuffed Animals

These were just a couple of the animals part of the little museum exhibit at Big Basin State Park.

Who's Your Great-Great-Grand-Daddy?

The other day at the gym I was surprised to see an issue of the journal Science among the normal fitness/body building ones in a basket in the lobby. I was a little early for yoga, so I sat down for a quick read. As I thumbed through some of the shorter articles I came across one discussing the recently-complicated family tree of we humans that was pretty neat.
For the past 100,000 years or so we have been tooling around the earth doing our "thing" which involved learning, creating culture, reproducing and all that fun stuff. But many of us forget (or maybe never realized to begin with) that we weren't the only folks around at that time. In the past 35,000 years there were Neandertals for one, and archaic humans called the Denisova hominin in addition to ourselves. And if you go back to the beginning of that 100,00 years when Homo sapiens emerged there were probably a few of our older ancestors still running around, like Australopithecus sediba and so on.
Anyway, for almost the entire history of anthropology it was thought that we humans never mated with any of our  early neighbors. But DNA sequencing is turning that idea on it's head. Recent study comparing modern human DNA to Neandertal and Denisovan DNA has produced the following results:

• Eastern Europeans and Asian people have inherited 2%-6% of their DNA from Neadertals.
• Peoples of Southwest Asia have inherited about 5% of their DNA from the Denisovans, and another 4-6% from Neandertals. (Another study found this same distribution in people in the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and Melanesia.) (That's about 10% total!!!)
• Denisovan DNA was found in Australian aboriginals
• Three isolated African groups inherited DNA from an unknown archaic people, long after modern humans arose.
• It has been discovered that over half of the human genes that code for leukocyte antigen proteins, (i.e.the ones that help detect pathogens in the blood) came from some or another "archaic" human.

I guess maybe I should point out before closing what is meant by archaic humans. They were still Homo but their DNA shows them to be distinct from us modern humans. They appear to have evolved from the same ancestors as Neandertals, but were closely enough related to humans to be able to reproduce.

Note: You may notice that I spell Neandertal with a "t" rather than a "th". I believe the "th" is the American version, but in all of my readings (both in school, and in scientific journals) always uses the "t" version, and I figured if it's good enough for Science it's good enough for me.

You have Beautiful...Eye.

Water flea
http://discovermagazine.com/2012/mar/30-heres-looking-at-you-kid

I saw this photo in the most recent edition of Discover Magazine at the local library, and then I searched it out on their website (which by the was is fantastic,and totally one of my favorite Internet haunts). The image is of a water flea. Yep. Can you believe that? I sat there for at least five minutes trying to figure out if it was some kind of joke or something, but it's not. It's the real deal. And I think this little guy/gal...whatever, is pretty awesome (and I'm invoking the original sense of the word here, not the modern day meaning). The article is short, but definitely worth the one minute it will take to read it. The other highlight the author points out is that these transparent little specks have about 5,000 more genes than we do! I don't know how that's possible, but there you have it. I swear that every single day I am more amazed by what life is, and how life does. It reminds me of that quote by the late Carl Sagan. "I find it elevating and exhilarating to discover that we live in a Universe which permits the evolution of molecular machines as intricate and subtle as we." Although just for today I might replace the "we" with "a water flea".

On a slightly more humorous note for some reason the water flea photo instantly reminded me of this seedy plankton character that I saw on Sponge Bob. I looked it up and his name is Sheldon J. Plankton...LOL...

The second thing I thought of was Mike Wazowski. 

Google Rocks

I love the Google homepage logo for today! It's not often that you see geology incorporated into internet art. Curious about what inspired the geo-drawing I did a little research, and found out that today is the 374th birthday of Nicholas Steno the founding father of the geological sciences.
Back in the 1600's in addition to realizing that fossils were the remains of animals that no longer existed (I guess at the time people thought they were left over from the flood?), he also discovered the three of the primary laws of geology which remains uncontested today.
The law of original horizontality states that all sedimentary rock layers originally form horizontally, and are only tilted later. The law of superposition states that the material in the lowest layer is older than the material in the upper layers. And the law of discontinuity states that if one object or rock layer cuts another than the layer that is cut is older than the one doing the cutting.
So, thanks Nick for all your great observations and starting my specific branch of science! You rock! (ha ha get it?)

The Great Basin Bristlecone Pine

Bristlecone Pine

Have you ever wondered where the oldest trees on earth reside? Or maybe what kind of tree they are? It seems as though lots of us (including myself) just assumed they were the giant redwoods (something like lodgepole pines, or the giant Sequoias). But that's not true. I was listening to an NPR show the other day and heard a story, a sad but true one, about the oldest tree (and thus oldest living thing) ever discovered on earth. After a little additional digging I got the whole scoop.
The story starts in eastern Nevada, in a group of mountains called the Snake Range. I happen to be intimately familiar with these mountains because I spent the better part of a month exploring them over the course of two summers while teaching SJSU field camp. Anyway, the highest peak in the range is Mt. Wheeler. It is located within the boundary of what is now called Great Basin National Park (where we camped). It also includes Lehman Caves which are pretty cool.
High up on Mt. Wheeler there is a grove, or group  of Great Basin Bristlecone Pines that resided on the harsh and unfriendly slope of the mountain. Unlike how they sound, bristlecone pines don't really look like pine trees. They are gnarled, and appear dead for the most part. They have this tortured look about them as if someone took a regular tree and bent and twisted it into a grotesque sculpture and then stripped it of its green. But at the same time, they are incredibly beautiful too. I have had many opportunities to see bristlecones up close and while they are ugly in a way, they have a regal defiance about them, that makes them...extraordinary. They are old but brave. They are bombarded by freezing cold, blazing sun, very little water and nutrient poor soils, yet they patiently eek out a living  in a little patch of barren earth they have called home for hundreds or thousands of years.
Getting back to my point though, there was one particular tree in this grove on Mt. Wheeler named Prometheus. Notice I said "was". This is the sad part of the story. As it goes a grad-student from the University of South Carolina was doing some climate work for his thesis. His name was (is, he's still alive) Donald Currey. Part of his project was drilling cores into these old trees to get information about the climate over the past few millenia by a process called dendrochronology. He claims that while he was trying to drill a core into Prometheus his drill broke. He immediately became concerned because he didn't have another one, and if he didn't get his sample he would have to wait a whole year to get back out in the field and collect the data. Apparently he consulted the Forest Service (it wasn't a national park yet) and they shrugged and basically said, "Well, just chop it down. There are a bunch more trees up there. One won't make a difference." So that's what he did. It was only afterward (according to Currey), as he was tracing the rings of the tree back through time that he realized how ancient the tree was. But by then it was obviously too late.
How old was this gnarly old tree? Best estimates put it at 4862 years old, but it may have been over 5000.
It's hard to imagine that tree sitting up on that slope for five thousand years. It's hard to imagine that 'Prometheus' had already been living for three thousand years before Jesus was (supposedly) born! Or even more incredible think of this, it was a sapling when animals like cave lions still roamed the earth!
It's amazing that one man was able to do in just a few minutes what thousands of years of natural adversity and lightning were unable to. It's really sad too.

A slice of Old Prometheus

And that's the story of the oldest living thing ever discovered on earth, from beginning to tragic end. One good thing did come of this disaster however. Since the discovery of the bristlecone pines extreem age, they are now protected by the government through the National Parks Service and other means. Old Prometheus may be gone, but if you'd like to see his buddies, other trees he spent thousands of years with, you can still head out to Great Basin NP, climb up Mt. Wheeler and say hello.

Consile This

I just started reading Consilience by Edward O. Wilson, And when I say "just started" I mean I am 10 pages in. The basic idea, from what I've gathered in the pages I have read so far, is that the author believes eventually science will merge with social science and everything will be explained and made clear through a singular set of laws. Philosophy will cease to exist, because every aspect of human endeavor will play by the universal rules, and so become understandable, testable, and predictable. At the moment I haven't the slightest idea of how this might happen, but it appears by the length of his book that Wilson has come up with a solution. I was going to read more, but I suddenly felt more like writing and thinking. (Not that reading doesn't require thinking, but I mean pondering/thinking not analysing/thinking.)

I have been toying around with a similar idea (or maybe the same one?), although I never gave it a name, whereby every human action and decision no matter how ridiculous or surprising might be understood in a fundamental way if viewed through the active mechanism of evolutionary progress. It is the idea that no matter what we do, no matter how badly we want to be in control of who we are, at the heart of every action that we are capable of performing we will always find that we are doing what 3.5 million years of evolution is telling us to do. From that point of view, psychology would not be the study of why humans act and feel the way we do. We would already know that. The study would focus rather on figuring out how our actions and feelings are satisfying our (to borrow a phrase from Star Trek) prime directive of evolving.
Even the actions of the insane and mentally ill could be "understood" because if there is some physical ailment that interferes with their ability to function then it stands to reason that their judgement and decisions would be faulty because of it (and not a their own fault). But what would that do to our legal/justice system?

The question becomes if everyone always does what nature intended, then is everything hopeless? If everyone since the dawn of consciousness (and before it for that matter) is doing what evolution wants them to do, then you could argue that the reason we have not achieved things like world peace is because we were never meant to. That's as good an example as any. At first glance killing each other appears counter-evolutionary, but maybe there is a reason we have been fighting each other for centuries. One might argue that it has been our primary means of population control. Our instinct to take over what others have instead of live peacefully side by side could be interpreted to be a result of the fact that evolution has shown that in the long run it is more beneficial to have your neighbor dead than living next door with his 50 offspring and a dwindling supply of land and food.
A dog can learn to open a car door, but it can't speak English. A dog is limited by what it is. Maybe we are limited in the same way? We might learn some cool tricks and have some nifty ideas, but maybe we lack the ability to change the world we live in literally because we are human. I don't know, does that sound depressing? Who cares if it's depressing, what if it's true? Science and philosophy, thought and instinct all rolled into one smooth reality.

Like I said, I haven't read the book yet, so hopefully whatever Wilson has to say on the subject is encouraging and not defeatist. I am already confused! Any thoughts?

Holeyfin

I was hoping to spread my book reviews out a little, but I am already three titles behind, so I thought I'd rather catch up all at once and have my facts straight rather than wait and forget.
I read somewhere that dolphins, along with chimpanzees, where the smartest animals besides us. So I went searching for a book about dolphins. I ended up getting To Touch a Wild Dolphin by Rachel Smolker.
While the book was a quick read, and not poorly written, I didn't care for it much in that it was more of a memoir of the author, and less about the actual data and research I was looking for. It was a good story, and had I been just wanting "something to read" in general, I probably would have appreciated it more. The other problem I saw with the book is that much of the data and methods of collecting data appear to me to be very outdated and so I am not sure how accurate the information I learned really is.
But I thought I'd pass around a few highlights/ interesting observations the author made while studying dolphins at Monkey Mia on the west coast of Australia. I am choosing facts that I don't think have changed with more recent observations.

• Dolphins evolved from a land animal (as did whales). They most likely belong to the group of mammals referred to as ungulates (cows, camels, deer etc).
  
• Their terrestrial origin is the reason why their tails are horizontal and flip up and down vertically through the water, as opposed to fish where they flip side to side.
• Dolphins are the only mammals who breath consciously. If for some reason they are rendered unconscious they will drown.
• Dolphins don't "sleep" or go into REM, so theoretically they don't dream. They do have the ability to rest one side of their brain at a time though which is their equivalent of sleep.
• Dolphins can plan ahead, (example: dolphin wants to fight another dolphin ( for what else? a female) but is outnumbered. He will go get his "pals" and then come back).
• Dolphins can use simple tools. They employ sponges and shells to do tasks.
• Baby dolphins nurse for up to four years!
• Dolphins have names for themselves. (unique whistle calls)

If anyone knows of, or has read any good books on dolphins that would maybe focus more on their intelligence, and the methods used to discern it, please let me know! It's really fun to think about the possibilities of being able some day to communicate with dolphins the way we can communicate with chimpanzees now. Can you imagine what they could tell us about the ocean?

P.S. Holeyfin was the matriarch dolphin at Monkey Mia. She was named such because she had a hole in her dorsal fin.

When it Reins it Pours

I have noticed the more I read, the more connections and odd coincidences I seem to notice in my normal day to day life. (Either that or I am becoming paranoid like the character Belbo in Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco.) For example I read a novel (not a very good one, but it was ok) a couple of weeks ago where they mention this guy named Giordano Bruno, who was a 16th century monk. Then I when I was reading Discover Magazine yesterday they referenced him in an article about SETI.
Or take today. I was on line reading random news articles and I came across one about how the global warming is threatening reindeer herds across northern Europe (by partially melting the snow and creating hard ice over the lichens that they graze upon in winter). It seems that some scientist think the best solution is to castrate many of the males (thus causing them to retain antlers that would normally be shed in the winter) so they can use them to break through the ice and get at their food source. (As a side note, this is completely illogical. What point is there of the males surviving if they are unable to reproduce? Duh...)Then just a while ago I was reading Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by C. Sagan and A. Druayn, and right there in a chapter called 'The Rape of Caenis' they mention reindeer again and how Sami women (previously called Lapp people) of northern Europe used to castrate reindeer with their teeth! Isn't that a very...odd coincidence? Two stories about reindeer castration in one day!

Note: After I am done reading the above mentioned book, I am going to post a blog with some of the highlights/insights I picked up. As a prologue: The book started out slow, but it's been better since I got past a couple billion years of asexual reproduction. Sex makes everything more interesting. Especially biological history.

Ants In My...Head

I have no intention of regularly using my blog as a venue for describing dreams I've had, but I just had to mention this one before it fades away into the nothingness from which it originated. It' is simply too weird not to. Was I flying you might ask? No, I wasn't. Did I meat a famous person? No. Did I win the lottery? Unfortunately...No.

No, I spent all of last night reading/ perusing a ten volume set of books dedicated to describing the various ant species of the world. Isn't that about the most random thing you have ever heard? I don't even like ants, or have any interest in them at all. But I can still remember turning page after page (after page...), reading all sorts of interesting (and obviously untrue) things about ants, looking at pictures, trying to sound out their species names, and scrunching my nose in disgust at the look of some of them.

For example (I literally read this in my sleep), there were these ants from Africa ( Hymenoptera africaneus) that lived in the detritus under certain kinds of pine trees that existed in the rainforest there. The ants were big and black like carpenter ants, but they were covered in coarse hair (which was really gross by the way). The book said that the pine tree gave off a lot of C02 in the local vicinity of it's branches, and thus the bugs that were drawn to the scent of it's sap would suffocate, die and fall to the forest floor below where the ants ran back and forth along the base of the tree catching the bugs in the hair on their back and carry them (which was much easier than dragging prey with teeth or legs) to their nest. In return the ants provided nutrients for the tree when their dead bodies decomposed around it's roots, and so they were kind of symbiotic, and always where you found one, you found the other.


It kind of makes me sad to think none of it is true. I mean I just spent 7 hours reading a fictional encyclopedia on ants...for nothing. At least I am not tired though. Eh, anyway...that was my dream.

Just FYI, I looked up Hymenoptera (because it was really weird that the name sounded familiar), and it turns out to be the order that ants belong to, but so do bees and wasps etc. and I used it as a genus name. I recall reading an essay about wasps a few months ago, so maybe that's were I picked it up? So I guess I didn't make everything up.

Albert the Albatross

As I was (and still am) sitting at my desk today waiting to find something to do, I got to wondering. And you want to know what I wondered? I wondered how an Albatross can fly for months at a time without landing.So...since I had the time, I looked it up. And here is the answer in a nutshell.

They don't flap their wings to keep moving rather they utilize two methods of soaring. Dynamic soaring is when they fly into the wind and their wings lift them up, and then they glide down and when they get close to the water they tilt so the wind picks them up again. The other is called slope soaring and the albatross rides the wind that comes of the back of large waves.
The real secret though is that they have tendons on their shoulders which lock and hold the wings open. So they aren't expending any energy at all to keep their wings extended like most other birds, and are actually as comfortable as if they were at rest. All they do basically is lean into and out of the wind (when they are not hunting anyway).
Additionally I learned that because they are expending such little energy while flying, their heart rate drops to about what it would be if they were resting, so they don't need to sleep. (I guess that makes sense because the only other alternative is that they fly at night with their eyes closed, and...well, that's just silly.)

Something else related to the albatross (although not scientific at all) is that in the "olden days" sailors supposedly considered it bad luck if one decided to follow their boat. In one of my polar exploration books one of the men said it was because they were supposed to be the souls of sailors lost at sea, forever searching the ocean for their ship...I think that's kind of romantic.

Well, I'd better go...I have a lot of wondering left to do today.

Gould is Gold

I just got two new books in the mail today! Both were written by Stephen Jay Gould. They are titled Ever Since Darwin, and Bully for Brontosaurus. I won't start them yet because I am concurrently reading another Gould book, Hens Teeth and Horses Toes and The Outline of History by H.G. Wells.
I like the way Gould writes. It's not too technical, but technical enough to make his arguments, or perspectives valid. And each essay is only a few pages long, so I can read one at a time, and I don't loose my train of thought if I take a break between sections. One of the great things he does (and does exceedingly well) is give perspective on a lot of scientific research that to the normal person like you and I would think is pointless. He is able to illustrate why studying land snails in the Bahamas, or why Jean Baptiste Lamarck erroneous theories of human development are important to me and you. Not only does he explain scientific phenomena and research, but he also tells you about the men and women (mostly men back int he old days) who did the science, and what the world was like while they were formulating their ideas. It's really fascinating. A lot of what I think about lately has been inspired by reading some or another essay that I have read by Gould. I highly recommend any of his books to readers interested in dipping their toes in the cool waters of natural history.