October 1, 2007 5:00

Flash: Saber-Toothed Tiger Was Really Dangerous

When I was a kid, toy dinosaur sets usually came with a little toy saber-toothed tiger, formally known as Smilodon. It wasn't because the toymakers were Creationists who thought every animal that ever lived was on the Earth at one time, but rather because the saber-tooth had the same appeal as the dinosaurs did: it was exotic-looking, really scary and safely extinct (although, unlike the dinosaurs, it did prowl the Earth when our human ancestors were around, finally going extinct only about 10,000 years ago.

Actually, the saber-tooth wasn't a tiger at all, which is why paleontologists call them saber-toothed cats instead (or some variation). Now Australian researchers have made a new discovery about the nightmarish-looking beasts, being reported today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. What interests me, though, isn't the discovery itself so much as the way they're trying to sell it to the media. The headline on the press release reads: "Scientists say sabercat bit like a pussycat."

If you're like me, you probably assume this means they're saying the cats weren't all that dangerous after all. If so, we're both wrong. You don't have to read very far into to the release before you realize that all they're talking about is the bite. According to a computer-based analytical technique borrowed from engineering, called finite element analysis, the saber-tooth's bite was only a third as powerful as a modern lion's. "It bit," one of the scientists says in the press release, "like a moggy."

Leaving aside the fact that I never heard the term "moggy" before this minute, the release goes on to admit that the saber-tooth cat could still rip you into small pieces in seconds. It would just bite you less hard than a lion while doing so (probably more like a pit bull—what a relief!).

It actually is interesting science, if you're following what they call the "150-year-old debate" about how hard a saber-tooth could bite. And it shows how a technique invented to study the structural strength of manufactured items can be borrowed by biologists.

But that headline may be just a tiny bit too sensational, don't you think?

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September 20, 2007 2:49

New Information on Hobbits

Not Hobbits, really, but "hobbits," a race of diminutive humans whose bones were uncovered in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2004. Their miniature stature was explained by a phenomenon known as "island dwarfing," in which large mammals tend to get smaller when they live on isolated islands (modern examples include water buffalo and elephants—so that wasn't particularly exciting.

But the find was sensational, because while the remains were only about 13,000 years old, they had characteristics of Homo erectus—a distant human ancestor that was thought to have disappeared at least half a million years ago. Finding a long-extinct species that survived almost until moder times (and who knows if these bones were from the last survivors?) would completely overturn existing ideas about human evolution.

I wrote about the discovery in TIME when it first happened. But since then, a controversy has raged between those who support the original theory about what the hobbits were, and those who think they were really just ordinary homo sapiens who had some sort of deformities.

Now comes a report in Science that appears to strengthen the original theory: an international team of scientists, led by the Smithsonian Institution, has analyzed the wrist bones of the tiny creatures, and says that they look nothing like those of modern humans, or even of Neanderthals, but rather resemble the wristbones of African apes and our earliest human ancestors--earlier, even than Homo erectus.

It's an easy trap to fall into when looking at scientific evidence to want the more exciting, exotic interpretation to be true, and so I have to try and resist that impulse in myself. But...I kind of want this to be true, so I'll grasp at this particular straw until I'm proven wrong. For now, the idea that primitive human ancestors walked the Earth just yesterday (in the grand scheme of evolution), is still alive. I hope it stays that way.

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September 6, 2007 2:00

Why Honeybees are Vanishing

The mysterious phenomenon known as Bee Colony Collapse Disorder has been worrying scientists, beekeepers and growers for months now (I blogged on it last February). Without the domesticated bees that are trucked around the country to pollinate such crops as almonds, peaches, blueberries, cucumbers and squash (but not, fortunately, wheat or corn), supplies would plummet.

Theories about why huge numbers of hives have been abandoned, their inhabitants presumably dead, have included parasites and environmental toxins—but now Science magazine is weighing in with a suite of papers, based on genomic analysis, that points to a microbe called Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus. You can read about it in this special report. The authors of the papers are pretty convinced that the virus is a significant part of the problem, but probably not the only one. Parasites and pesticides almost certainly weakened the bees, allowing the virus to have maximum effect. Still, identifying the virus could be a big step toward reversing the big bee die-off.

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August 10, 2007 5:51

Comment about the latest evolution post

I asked commenter Zachary Petit, who isn't so sure about evolution but wants others to accept creationism, how he responds to people who think they've been abducted by aliens, or who think the moon landings were faked.

He responds, in part.

ML: How is that at all relevant? Aliens?

Yes, aliens. You ask people to be open to opposing views, but many think your acceptance of Biblical creationism is about as poorly founded as the examples I quoted above. That's why it's relevant: show us by example how we should respond to you.

E

veryone (again): My personal evidence, as I've stated, is a physical experience. However, I can logically make sense of creationism with all of today's observations. Give me an instance in nature and my belief can support it. How is a belief of evolution any different? However, if you'd like something to chew on for a bit, consider that drawing an ace, king, and queen of the same suit out of 6 cards in a deck has the odds of (I think) something over 10,000:1. Now lets get more complex... like for example the appropriate level of hydrogen and oxygen to exist on a planet to support life of this magnitude. And let's make it the correct temperature. And let's make the air pressure bareable. And so on and so forth. I can't imagine all of that happening on a whim. I'm sure you all can support this with your own theories, but there you have it.

--No, I can't imagine it happening on a whim either, but since nobody (except creationists, come to think of it) suggested that it did happened on a whim (that is, God's whim), this is strawman. As is the card analogy: if you give me a billion dealers with a billion decks of cards and a million years, I'll give you so many ace-king-queens of the same suit that your head will spin. You also falsely imply that only one precise set of temperature, pressure and so on could have led to life. Who says? You damage your credibility with such comparisons.

I can make sense of creationism with today's evidence too. I can just say "whatever it is, God did it." But that's hardly an explanation.

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August 9, 2007 2:31

Astonishing News on Human Evolution! Or...Maybe not.

News reports are buzzing today with the announcement of two newly identified fossils, published in Nature, that purport to upend the conventional view of human evolution. "Fossils in Kenya Challenge Linear Evolution," shouts the New York Times, and others emphasize this amazing fact as well. What happened is that a team of fossil hunters including Maeve and Louise Leakey, of the world's greatest paleontological dynasty, discovered two sets of remains not far from Lake Turkana, in Kenya. One was the 1.5-million year-old skullcap from a Homo erectus; the other, part of the jaw of a Homo habilis, dated to about 1.44 million years ago.

But...but...Homo habilis arose earlier, and was supposed to have given rise to Homo erectus, which gave rise to us. This new discovery implies that both species were actually walking around at the same time!

It might seem incredible, until you read these words:

At just about any given moment in prehistory, our family tree included several species of hominids--erect, upright-walking primates. All were competitors in an evolutionary struggle from which only one would ultimately emerge. Then came yet another flowering of species that would compete for survival.

That's an excerpt from the TIME cover story on human evolution my colleague Andrea Dorfman and I put together—in 1999. In short, the linear evolution of one species into another hasn't been the conventional wisdom for a long, long time, so the amazing discovery isn't so amazing after all.

It's too bad we journalists tend to feel the need to make everything seem "astonishing," since this discovery is plenty interesting in any case. The Homo habilis bones are younger than any yet found, which extends that species' survival longer than anyone suspected. And the H. erectus skullcap is quite small. Because it's believed to be from a female, that suggests a significant difference in size between the genders. That's not astonishing either, just intriguing.

Which really should be enough for anyone, don't you think?

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