Philippa Kaur

A new book by ecologist Rebecca Nesbit argues that it’s time to stop being romantic about nature and make some rational decisions about what to save

Humans

9 February 2022

By Simon Ings

Would cutting down the last oak tree on Earth make you a bad person?Vandervelden/Getty Images
Tickets for the Ark
Rebecca Nesbit
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IMAGINE you are the last person on Earth. On your dying day, you cut down the only remaining oak tree, just because you can. Are you morally in the wrong?
Rebecca Nesbit would argue that you aren’t. A science writer and ecologist, she has form in tackling subjects where scientific rationalism and general intuition don’t necessarily line up. Her first book, Is That Fish in Your Tomato?, explored the pros and cons of genetically modified foods. In Tickets for the Ark, she turns her spotlight to the moral complexities of conservation.
She points out that, given we can’t save every species, we have some difficult decisions to make. For example, if push came to shove and their extinctions were imminent, should we choose to preserve bison or the Siberian larch; yellowhammers or Scottish crossbills; salmon or seals? And what criteria should we use to decide? Charisma, perhaps, or their edibility? Are native species more important than invasive ones? And is it morally acceptable to kill some animals to make room for others?
Working through these gnarly issues, Nesbit shows how complex and problematic conservation can be. In particular, she questions the way that efforts tend to focus on the preservation of species. This, she points out, is really us deciding to save what we can easily see. If our aim was to preserve the planet’s biodiversity, we could as easily focus on genes, individual strings of DNA or the general health of whole ecosystems, she argues.
At times, Tickets for the Ark reads as a catalogue of errors on the part of well-meaning conservationists. Many conservation projects are attempts to reverse human interference in nature – clearly an impossible task, considering we have been shaping the biosphere for at least 10,000 years.
Far from being a counsel of despair, though, Tickets for the Ark reveals the intellectual vistas that such blunders have opened up. Even supposing it ever existed, we know now that we can’t return Earth to some prelapsarian Eden. All we can do is learn how natural systems change – sometimes under human influence, sometimes not – and use this information to shape the future world according to our values and priorities.
In a sense, of course, we have always done this. What is agriculture, if not a way of moulding the land to our requirements? But now that we have learned to feed ourselves, perhaps it is time to think a little more broadly.
“If we accept that conservation is about the future not the past, the most troubling conundrums fall away”
To do that, we need to accept two things: one, that “nature” is a social construct, and two, that conservation is about the future, not the past. Then the most troubling conundrums in conservation fall away, writes Nesbit. The death of the last oak, at the hands of the last human, becomes merely the loss of a category (oak tree) that was defined and valued by humans – a loss that was inevitable at some point anyway. It is a conclusion that is counter-intuitive and feels uncomfortable, but Nesbit says that it should be liberating because it leaves us “free to discuss logically what we should save and why, and not just fight an anti-extinction battle that is doomed to failure”.
With this in mind, we can consider what conservation efforts will achieve for entire ecosystems and biodiversity as a whole without wasting our time agonising over whether, say, British white-clawed crayfish are natives, or if dingoes are a separate species from other wild dogs, or whether we are morally entitled to introduce bison to clear the steppe of Siberian larch. Larch is a native species, but it is also covering and warming ancient carbon-sequestering permafrost. In an era of potentially catastrophic climate change, Nesbit argues that we should keep our eyes on the bigger picture.
This is an ambitious and entertaining book, which foresees a dynamic and creative role for conservation in the future. Having freed ourselves of the idea that species belong in their original ranges, we may decide that it makes more sense to shepherd the most vulnerable species into new habitats where they have a better chance of survival. A brave proposal – but, as Nesbit points out, for some species, such drastic measures may be the only option.

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Japanese folk songs evolved in the same way as those sung in English even though there are significant cultural differences in musical tone and scales

Humans

3 February 2022

By Jason Arunn Murugesu
A woman playing a koto, a traditional Japanese musical instrumentShutterstock/PixHound
Japanese folk songs evolved in the same way as English language ones even though they are sung in different tones and scales.
Patrick Savage at Keio University in Japan and his colleagues analysed the musical notation of more than 10,000 folk songs, including the well-known Child Ballads from the pre-20th century. Around 4125 of the songs were sung in English and 5957 were Japanese.
The team defined a folk song quite loosely. “There are a lot of definitions, but we essentially said a folk song is an old song that has been orally transmitted between generations,” says Savage.Advertisement
There are a few differences between Japanese and English folk songs. For example, Japanese folk songs use a five-note musical scale, whereas English ones typically use a seven-note scale. They are also quite different tonally.
The researchers, however, were looking specifically at how the two musical genres evolved and whether there were any similarities. They first converted the musical notations into letter sequences that could be read by an algorithm that usually tracks evolutionary changes in nature. “This algorithm can identify highly related pairs of melody,” says Savage.

The nature of the subject matter influenced the analysis. “It is difficult to tell which version of a song or which style of melody came first,” says Savage. This means that when the researchers compared two similar songs, they couldn’t say for sure whether a difference in the number of notes between the two was due to an insertion or a deletion – so they treated all of these sorts of changes as the same.
They could, however, distinguish insertion/deletions from note substitutions, where the number of notes in a melody is the same in two songs, but a given note has a different value in each song.
The researchers found that these note substitutions were less likely than note insertions or deletions in both Japanese and English folk songs. “We think this is because note insertions or deletions don’t really affect the melody too much,” he says. “Substitutions, like singing everything in a lower note, obviously messes up the melody a lot more.”
What’s more, the effect was stronger in Japanese songs. “Ornamentation is a bigger deal in Japanese folk songs,” says Savage, referring to when small, rapid changes are made to non-essential notes in a melody.
The team also found that musical notes that played a bigger role in a song’s melody were less likely to change as the ballad evolved. “The way the music is being transmitted – whether they are Japanese or English – is very analogous,” says Savage.
“The patterns of change documented in this study will come as no great surprise to musicologists,” says Marisa Hoeschele at the Acoustics Research Institute in Austria. “But it is interesting that these same constraints apply cross-culturally.”
“Studying how folk music evolved can lead to insights into how cultural evolution occurs more generally,” adds Hoeschele.
Journal reference: Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.01.039
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New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

Humans

2 February 2022

Read
Strange Bedfellows accompany many of us through our lives, yet most of us know next to nothing about common sexually transmitted infections. Ina Park aims to change all that in this upbeat look at the science of STIs.
National Museums Scotland
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Audubon’s Birds of America is a chance to see this rare, hand-coloured natural history book and to learn more about its controversial creator, John James Audubon. It is on show at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh from 12 February.Advertisement
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Death by Shakespeare sees chemist Kathryn Harkup reveal the science behind some of the grisly methods used by the Bard to kill characters in his plays. Online talk by the Royal Institution on 10 February at 7pm GMT.

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By Clare Wilson
GAP Photos/Anna Omiotek-TottIN MY garden, bulbs such as snowdrops are coming up. Every year, I wonder if spring is arriving earlier due to climate change.
One study from 2006 found that many signs of spring, such as plant species unfurling their leaves, had been hastened by 7.5 days across Europe in the previous 30 years (Global Change Biology, doi.org/b7vmgk). And research published this week has found that UK plants are flowering nearly a month earlier than they did before the mid-1980s, probably due to warmer temperatures from January to April.
You might think that warmer weather would be welcomed by gardeners, … More

Josie Ford
Va va vacuum
Like many people who have difficulty distinguishing science fact from fiction, Feedback is anticipating with trepidation the rise of the sentient machines. We see the story recently reported by the BBC, “Robot vacuum cleaner escapes from Cambridge Travelodge”, as a kind of low-budget prequel.
“The automated cleaner failed to stop at the front door of the hotel in Orchard Park in Cambridge on Thursday, and was still on the loose the following day,” the article informs us, emphasising the point made by observers, sensibly hiding on social media, that robotic vacuum cleaners have no natural predators in the wild.
Nature also abhors a vacuum, of course. Fortunately, the Cambridge incident had a happy ending: the errant sweeper was “found under a hedge on Friday”. A mere test run, we fear. As is traditional, we would like to take this opportunity to state that we, for one, welcome our new robot vacuum cleaner overlords.Advertisement
Big. Very big.
“Asteroid bigger than Carrauntoohil to soar past Earth tonight,” boomed the Irish Examiner on 18 January, in a clipping sent by Stuart Neilson. “Named 7482 (1994 PC1), the asteroid is more than a kilometre wide at 1,052m and is just about bigger than Ireland’s highest peak, Carrauntoohil which is 1,038m tall.”
For those still struggling with just how big that is, never fear. “Its size means it is also bigger than the Burj Khalifa in Dubai which, at 830m, is the world’s tallest building,” we further read.
So pretty big, then. “Most asteroids that whizz past the Earth are about the size of a family car. They’re not terribly big but this one is not the size of a family car, it’s the size of Carrauntoohil,” space commentator Leo Enright added helpfully. Our only open question now is how big is a family car in Burj Khalifas.
Mind that gravity
“Is the Hubble crisis connected with the extinction of dinosaurs?” enquires physicist Leandros Perivolaropoulos at the University of Ioannina, Greece, in a paper recently added to the arXiv preprint server, meriting an immediate induction into our pile of “questions we had not thought to ask”.
To back up some 13.8 billion years: the Hubble crisis (we paraphrase, slightly) is the fact that if you look at what the universe was doing very far over there in the dim and distant, and then work out what it should be doing over here now, what it is actually doing now is different, meaning something naughty must have happened when our backs were turned.
Something like, we don’t know, someone pressing a taped-over button on a control panel saying “do not touch” and inadvertently increasing the strength of gravity rather suddenly about 100 million years ago.
Stuff happens. The point is, had this increase actually occurred, it might explain the Hubble crisis and also, according to Perivolaropoulos’s calculations, have discombobulated the outer solar system sufficiently to have sent a load more space rocks careering towards Earth. This might have included the one that came steaming in flying a dino skull and crossbones flag some 66 million years ago.
We like this idea, on the basis that no one is going to tell us it isn’t true. And on the scale of cosmic conspiracies, this is hardly the largest. Everything is connected to everything else, after all, which is why we are going to go out on a limb and say it was actually the big bang that did for the dinosaurs.
Quantum whipping
A hop, skip and a jump across the Ionian Sea away, meanwhile, Theodore Andronikos and Michael Stefanidakis at the Ionian University on Corfu consider how a quantum parliament would work, also on the arXiv server.
Why, you may ask. The way things are going right now, we might counter: why not? Yet despite staring very hard at the paper for some time, our answer is somewhat indeterminate. The premise is replacing a system in which party loyalty dictates how legislators vote with a “free will radius” that can take any value from 0, for total loyalty, to 1, for total independence, running it through a quantum voting system and then seeing what happens.
Answer: it depends. But why stop there? What if not just quantum voting systems are employed, the authors muse, but voters, parties, politicians and bills themselves become quantum? “This is a fundamental question of a rather philosophical nature that is probably very hard to answer and, in our view, it deserves further consideration,” they write. We add it to our pile of ones we never thought to ask. Or not.
Entangled thinking
The covid-jabbed may find out sooner than we thought, if US anti-vaxxer Sherri Tenpenny is to be believed, an assertion to which we prophylactically assign a classical truth value of 0. “Remember this term, because you’re going to hear a lot of it in the next year: quantum entanglement,” she avers in a clip circulating on Twitter. “From a physics perspective, what happens when you take that shot in? There’s all this entangling that goes on, and what the artificial intelligence hooking you up to the Google credit scores and all of the dematrix and all of those things.”
Not only that, Sherri, it unleashes the robot vacuum cleaners, too. If this is the best we can come up with, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
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From how food is grown to how we generate power, Vaclav Smil’s new book outlines the basic technologies that keep society going and commands us to know them better

Humans

2 February 2022

By Simon Ings

IN SUCH a complex world, no one can be expected to understand everything. But for energy expert Vaclav Smil, there are limits. In his view, it is inexcusable that most of us don’t know the first thing about the basic workings of modern life and the technologies that keep us all alive. It’s not all rocket science, he says. “Appreciating how wheat is grown or steel is made… are not the same as asking… somebody to comprehend femtochemistry.”
Smil deplores the way that Western culture disproportionately rewards work that is removed from the material realities of life on Earth. Most of all, he is concerned that the general public is abandoning its grip on reality. How the World Really Works is Smil’s attempt to redress the balance, showing the fundamentals of how food is grown, how the built environment is made and maintained, and how all of this is powered.
Smil believes it is worth understanding what might seem like outdated technologies given that the building blocks of our lives won’t change significantly over the next 20 to 30 years. Most of our electricity is still gener­ated by steam turbines, invented by Charles Parsons in 1884, or by gas turbines, first commercially deployed in the late 1930s, he writes. And many of the trappings of the industrial world still hinge on the production of ammonia, steel, concrete and plastics, all of which currently require fossil fuels for their production. Even the newest technologies – AI, electric cars, 5G and space tourism – get most of their energy from fossil fuel-based turbines, says Smil.
Alternative methods are on their way, of course, but they will take decades to fully establish. Coal displaced wood relatively easily in the early 20th century, but it will probably take longer to bring in renewables because global energy demand is now an order of magnitude higher.
Given the irrefutable evidence of climate change, does this mean that Western civilisation, so hopelessly dependent on fossil fuels, is doomed?
Perhaps, but Smil would prefer that we concentrate on practical solutions, rather than wasting our energies on complex socio-economic forecasts. In his view, such forecasts will get less accurate over time because “more complex models combining the interactions of economic, social, technical, and environmental factors require more assumptions and open the way for greater errors”.
How the World Really Works neither laments the possibly imminent end of the world, nor bloviates about the potentially transformative powers of the AI Singularity. Indeed, it gives no quarter to such dramatic thinking, be it apocalyptic or techno-utopian.
Instead, in an era where specialisation is seen as the pinnacle of knowledge, Smil is an unapologetic generalist. “Drilling the deepest possible hole and being an unsurpassed master of a tiny sliver of the sky visible from its bottom has never appealed to me,” he writes. “I have always preferred to scan as far and as wide as my limited capabilities have allowed me to do.”
He chooses to explain the workings of the world as it is today, from energy to food, materials, the biosphere, globalisation and the perception of risk. He covers sizeable ground that other commentators ignore. It is a grumpy, pugnacious account that, I would argue, is intellectually indispensable in the run up to this year’s COP27 climate conference in Egypt. In short, How the World Really Works fully delivers on the promise of its title. It is hard to formulate any higher praise.

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By Michael Marshall

WHO were the first people to reach the Americas? When did they get there, and how? These are among the most mysterious questions in prehistory, and have long been studied using traditional archaeology: bones, artefacts and so on. In recent years, however, the field has been revolutionised by genetic data. DNA from living people and preserved remains has both enhanced and transformed our understanding of the continents’ First Peoples (those who were on the continent before Europeans arrived) and how they got there.
Jennifer Raff is a genetic anthropologist at the University of Kansas who has been involved in many studies of ancient American DNA, so she is an ideal guide to the subject. Her book Origin bills itself as “a genetic history of the Americas”, and it largely delivers on that promise. The final third of the book, in particular, draws on genetic and archaeological evidence to tell the story as we see it now. This section is a model of clear and nuanced explanation: Raff highlights the uncertainties and caveats, but doesn’t allow them to overwhelm the story.
The earlier part of the book is less clear in places. Raff re-examines not only some of the Americas’ most important digs, but the problems inherent in interpreting the evidence from artefacts alone, before the advent of genetic technology.
She recounts, for example, how archaeologists were convinced that the first people in the Americas were the Clovis, who made a distinctive kind of stone tool. This idea became dogma, and any archaeological sites that seemed older than the Clovis were dismissed – often on flimsy grounds. Only in the past decade or so has pre-Clovis settlement become accepted.
Then there is the question of how the First Peoples got there. All the evidence suggests that they came from Asia, but there is an open question over the route they took. The evidence is complex and contradictory, and Raff is admirably fair-minded in the way she handles it.
These sections are crucial to the story because they elucidate just how much light genetics has been able to shed on the big mysteries. Unfortunately, they jump back and forth in time, both in prehistory and in the historical sequence in which the discoveries were made, which can get a little confusing. The problem is exemplified by the first page, where an arresting anecdote is interrupted by four footnotes.
Despite this, Origin has many strengths. Raff is a critical historian of her own field, who casts a beady eye over the crimes and misdemeanours committed by earlier generations of archaeologists in the Americas. She argues that the story of anthropology in the Americas cannot be separated from the genocide perpetrated by Europeans on First Peoples. Archaeologists frequently dug up buried bodies without consulting local Native American groups, who regard the bodies as their own ancestors – a belief that has often been validated by genetic evidence.
These attitudes also fed into scientists’ conclusions. When huge artificial structures were found in North America, Europeans attributed them to a lost group of “Mound Builders” and argued that they couldn’t be the work of First Peoples.
“Raff casts a beady eye over the crimes and misdemeanours of earlier generations of archaeologists”
It will make uncomfortable reading for people still wrestling with the legacy of the European colonial empires. Some scientists may prefer that these darker episodes not be mentioned, but I tend to agree with Raff that it is crucial to face them head on. She argues that scientists studying the history and culture of Indigenous peoples anywhere in the world must be in constant dialogue with them: asking permission before conducting new studies and asking what the Indigenous peoples themselves want to know.
Minor niggles aside, then, Origin is a very human book. The settlement of the Americas isn’t simply a scientific mystery to be solved. For Raff, studying the First Peoples is also about learning collaboratively and healing the wounds of history.

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Moonfall sees director Roland Emmerich try to top his other disaster films, such as The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day, by knocking the moon out of orbit and crashing it into Earth. In cinemas from 4 February.

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The Man Who Tasted Words and other unusually gifted or affected people are the subject of neurologist Guy Leschziner’s journey through our senses, setting out how we use them to understand the complexities of the world around us.Advertisement
Rolex/Ambroise Tézenas
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Thao Nguyen Phan has combined videos, silk paintings and mixed media to explore the history, industry and contested future of Vietnam’s Mekong river. The exhibition runs at Tate St Ives, UK, from 5 February.

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