zygote daddy

changing the world, one tomato at a time

Alice Waters had an interesting op-ed piece in the Times today, calling for healthful eating to become part of school curricula, just as physical education became part of the curriculum a half century ago. Says Waters,

At [Berkeley's Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School] today, 1,000 children are involved in growing, preparing and sharing fresh food. These food-related activities are woven into the entire curriculum. Math classes measure garden beds. Science classes study drainage and soil erosion. History classes learn about pre-Columbian civilizations while grinding corn.

We're not forcing them to eat their vegetables; we're teaching them about the botany and history of those vegetables. We're not scaring them with the health consequences of their eating habits; we're engaging them in interactive education that brings them into a new relationship with food. Nothing less will change their behavior.

[W]hen a healthy lunch is a part of a class that all children have to take, for credit — and when they can follow food from the garden to the kitchen to the table, doing much of the work themselves — something amazing happens. The students want to taste everything. They get lured in by foods that are beautiful, that taste and smell good, that appeal to their senses. When children grow and prepare good, healthy food themselves, they want to eat it, and, what's more, they like this way of learning.

We need a revolution, a delicious revolution, that will induce children — in a pleasurable way — to think critically about what they eat. The study of food, and school lunch, should become part of the core curriculum for all students from kindergarten through high school. Such a move will take significant investment and the kind of resolve that this country showed a half-century ago. It will be costly, but if we don't pay now, the health care bill later will be astronomical.

Along this same vein, I'd also like to direct your attention to Slow Food, a great international organization seeking nothing less than to redefine modern society's relationship with food and food production. Another one to look at is the American Community Gardening Association, which is dedicated to the synergistic goals of food security, community vitality, and urban ecological health.

Just thought you should know.

 

 

data. sweet, sweet data.

Just saw an article about what looks like the coolest book ever. Well, a close second anyway. The new illustrated edition of The Elements of Style kicks serious ass. But that's for another time.

No, I'm talking about the 5000-page, five-volume, 29-pound behemoth known as Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times To The Present: Millennial Edition. Thirty-seven thousand data sets spanning the economic, demographic, and political history of the good ol' U.S. of A.

Oh yeah.

Want to find out how many married, but separated, white males there were in 1880? Look no further. Curious about long-term trends in broccoli production? Settle in for a bit. Can't remember the going price of vanadium in 1972? This bad boy will jog your memory.

And best of all, they don't bother with summary statistics or anything like that. Just row after row of pure unadulterated data.

It's a good time to be alive.

evolution is so ridiculously awesome

I think we've finally turned a corner in the evolution "debate". Actually, I should call it the "natural selection 'debate'", because evolution itself (i.e., change through time) has been widely accepted for centuries. Lamarck (or more properly, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck) was talking about evolution in the 18th century, although his idea of the inheritance of acquired traits now makes him the butt of jokes among biologists.

Can you imagine a worse fate than to be laughed at by biologists? The horror!

Sorry Dad, I forgot Rule 17 for a second...

Back to my point. I think we've come a long way recently, with Pennsylvania and Ohio the most recent states to decide that -gasp!- science belongs in science classrooms. Even the media have come around. Yesterday the Times had an article "dispel[ing] doubts about a theory of evolution", that wasn't talking about a debate over natural selection.

Thankfully, we're past that now.

Rather, the article was discussing two new studies published in that journal-of-journals Nature (Barluenga et al. 2006, Savolainen et al. in press). These two new studies give new evidence for sympatric speciation, where a species diverges into two in the same geographic area. This is a very cool idea. Usually, speciation occurs when there is a geographic barrier between populations (e.g., a mountain range, desert, ocean, etc.) that limits interbreeding, a process known as allopatric speciation. Over time, the genetic makeup of those populations will differentiate enough that they will be unable to interbreed, having evolved into separate species.

Voila! The origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life, to borrow a phrase from someone smarter than I.

Sympatric speciation is so cool because it doesn't require any geographic barriers to gene flow (man, they make it sound so technical, don't they?), relying instead on differences in behavior to prevent individuals from breeding (insert lame joke here). Until these most recent studies, it was pretty much just intellectual masturbation fodder, although it has been suggested in other species, most memorably the apple maggot fly. Yummy.

I love evolutionary biology. Good thing I'm a gittin' edji-mecated in it.

a gentle introduction to reconciliation ecology

There is something of a revolution going on in conservation ecology these days. And since neither guns, cocaine nor Marx are involved, I am clearly not talking about that kind of revolution. I refer instead to something called "reconciliation ecology", and it is quietly gaining steam in the arenas of conservation biology, urban planning, and good old pragmatism.

In a nutshell, it is the simple admission that sticking nature in protected reserves and writing everything else off is a fundamentally flawed strategy. Reconciliation ecology is the study and practice of integrating nature into our cities, suburbs, and farms, thereby taking a few eggs out of the nature reserve basket.

This is, of course, not a new concept in much of the world. Rooftop and windowsill gardens have been a staple of European and Asian cities for centuries. But nature conservation in the United States is still informed primarily by the "big wilderness" myth popularized by the Hudson River School. But I think we're coming around.

That is not to say we shouldn't keep making nature reserves, only that we cannot rely on them to preserve the Earth's biological diversity in perpetuity. And besides, relegating nature only to nature preserves means that people aren't exposed to it, and if people aren't exposed to nature, why should they care about its protection?

Just a little something to think about.

 

 

in which I spill tequila all over my work

Well, I guess I have to take a break now. As you can see, Tequila decided that my stack of references would a nice place to lay her head for a spell.

How's that for a desperate attempt at rationalization?

two gods among men. with superior grammar.

Has it really been two weeks since I was last here?

It's now 6 in the morning and I am still up writing. I seem to do that a lot these days, but I like working late at night. It's quiet. It's dark. I become completely consumed by putting words to paper. Actually, it's really more like putting electrons to silicon, or something like that. But that's neither here nor there.

Of course, now I get to start my work day. I walked back to the lab at about 4:30 this morning, because the dear wife was sleeping in the other room, which reminded me that I wasn't. I now have a full day of writing, meetings, more writing, and more meetings. And then I go home for a few hours' sleep, so that I can start my next 30 or 40-hour workday. Surprisingly, it's really not as bad as it sounds. I am excited about my work, and I never knew I had so much to say. This thing'll easily be 100 pages by the time I'm done.

And to think in high school I would lose sleep over having to write 5 pages on William Faulkner.

Ah yes, the reason I am here:

I was just looking through my copy of The Elements of Style, because I couldn't remember if you are supposed to hyphenate those odd adverbs-with-modifiers-used-as-adjectives mutants of verbage. As in, "My stress-addled brain makes me forget that I am supposed to wear similarly-colored socks when I leave the house."

Anyway, I logged on for a reason, and that is to convey to the world that The Elements of Style is one of the most incredible books ever published in the English language. Ever. Need proof? This is how Strunk and White address a common pitfall in writing: 

8. Avoid the use of qualifiers.
    Rather, very, little, pretty--these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words. The constant use of the word little (except to indicate size) is particularly debilitating; we should all try to do a little better, we should all be very watchful of this rule, for it is a rather important one and we are pretty sure to violate it now and then.

See what I mean? Best. Book. Ever.