Science: Postcards from the past?


For some time I’d been trying to figure out why, since I am so interested in history and tend to think in historical terms, I retain my early enthusiasm for science, which always seems so forward-looking. Attending a recent convention of the AAAS – the American Association for the Advancement of Science –- where I’d been invited to "present" a first viewing of a documentary based on my history of science, "Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold," the answer to my question began to take shape. In short form it is that good science, cutting-edge science, sends us postcards from the past.

Here are a few examples, taken from a single issue of the AAAS weekly magazine, "Science." I don’t pretend to understand all of what is in these articles, but the gist is clear.

The cover story actually made news in the wider world. It features a photo of a tiny chihuahua trotting alongside a great Dane that weighs more than 50 times the smaller one’s mass. Most of the lay articles about this referred – inaccurately, I thought – to there being more diversity in the sizes of dogs than in any other "mammalian species."

What about aquatic sea mammals, which range from tiny otters to huge whales? Opening the actual article in "Science," I found that the lay précis was in error. What the authors actually wrote was that dogs had more size diversity than any other "terrestrial vertebrates," a term that excludes sea-going mammals. So I read on. The extremes of size were traced to a single gene, located on chromosome 15, on an allele that sends coding signals that involve production of insulin.


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Here was a postcard from the near past — not from 15,000 years ago when, the authors say, the domestic dog separated from the wolf, but from the last few hundred years, during which the domestic pure breeds were developed. How could "evolutionary diversification in size ... occur rapidly?"

The 21 authors from a dozen different institutions aren’t sure yet, but they’ve located an important clue having to do with how bodies produce and digest proteins. Further spadework determined that this controlling allele developed early. That accounts for such puzzling archaeological facts as that the sizes of dog skeletons found in Eastern Russia from 14,000 years ago are much larger than dog skeletons of 12,000 years found in European and Middle Eastern digs.

The Letters column has three short pieces, two devoted to the flu, and both referring to the horrendous 1918 influenza pandemic that killed millions around the world. Epidemiologists are worried about a similar flu pandemic today. One letter laments that professional articles that could help developing countries prepare to combat a pandemic are in copyrighted magazines and cost too much to look at or copy – one article, whose author is a U.S. government official, can only be looked at for 24 hours for a $15 fee. How can this tangle of intellectual property rights and desperate medical need be solved? A second letter warns that in the next five decades, "influenza-associated mortality" is likely to be very high, and that we need to pay attention to what actually killed people in 1918, secondary bacterial infections, a cause that "seems to have been forgotten" and that needs more research.


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The third matter in the column, consisting of a letter in response to an earlier article and a rebuttal from the authors of the earlier article, goes back to the dawn of human history and attempts to trace a "back-migration into Africa" by means of combining evidence from DNA traces, language diversification, and surviving pottery. Is the Neolithic cave art from a site in the Sahara Desert evidence for an earlier or a later back migration? (The illustration shows a cave painting that strikingly resembles later Greek art.) Did the returning migrants bring with them "culture" from Europe? Or did they send culture to Europe? Are more answers to be found from further investigation of the DNA of the various tribes? I like the intellectual curiosity and reach of these investigations.

Under "neuroscience" is an article on how we may assimilate new information into our brains. How come a pro athlete can remember details of long-ago plays in his or her sport? And a champion poker player reconstruct card distribution and betting sequences of hands already played? Why can a scientist go to an academic seminar and remember complex new information from it easily, when the non-scientist can’t? The ability, say the authors, "depends as much on our possession of an appropriate mental schema as on the communicative skill of the speaker." That is, in our areas of special expertise – microbiology, cooking dinner, or color-coordinating our clothes – we have contexts and mental structures that allow us to readily incorporate new information and retain it properly. That is, we are able to utilize present information in proportion to how well organized our past information is. (There’s that postcard again.)

How to prove this theory? Eight researchers from four centers in Edinburgh, Tokyo and Trondheim (Norway) tried to do so by working with rats.

Let me preface this tale by a few words about rats. They’re our evolutionary third cousins. We have history together. Like humans, rats are mammals, quadrupeds, vertebrates whose brain sizes have approximately the same ratio to their body weights as ours do. Having once worked with rats in the lab, I can tell you that their smartness often amazes experimenters.

Anyway, in this series of experiments, the scientists set the rats certain tasks to do, and after they’d mastered those tasks, tracked how quickly and properly the rats were able to do additional but not exactly similar tasks. Long story short, they proved, at least to their satisfaction, that the "schemas," the contexts that we acquire in our brains through long (or intense) familiarity with a subject, are very important in learning; these have a "causal" role. How causal? Very, at least in rats — they learn new and complicated stuff in a single run if they’ve already acquired what I (not the authors) would call expertise in their fields. The rats were able to "encode, assimilate, and rapidly consolidate relevant new information after a single trial." The authors don’t say so, but I think these ingenious experiments give the lie to the saw that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

 

Author Tom Shachtman lives in Salisbury.

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