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The Meaning of Life

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Seed Magazine, September 4, 2007

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It’s hard to think of a word more charged with meaning–or meanings–than “life.” Some of the most passionate debates of our day, over stem cells or the right to die, genetically modified food, or wartime conduct, revolve around it. Whether we’re talking about when life begins or when it ends, the sanctity of life, or the danger of playing God, we all have an idea of what we mean when we talk about life. Yet, it often turns out, we actually mean different things. Scientists, despite their intimacy with the subject, aren’t exempt from this confusion.

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Monkey See, Monkey Do

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Forbes, August 28, 2007

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William McGrew spent much of the 1970s observing chimpanzees in Tanzania. One day the chimps did something odd. As two chimpanzees groomed each other’s hair, they each lifted an arm overhead. They clasped hands, forming a kind of primate A-frame.

McGrew and his collaborator, Caroline Tutin, had just spent months observing another chimpanzee community just a hundred miles away, and they had never seen that gesture before. But at their new field site, the A-frame handshake turned out to be common.

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A Daddy Longlegs Tells the Story of the Continents’ Big Shifts

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The New York Times, August 28, 2007

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Few people have heard of the mite harvestman, and fewer still would recognize it at close range. The animal is a relative of the far more familiar daddy longlegs. But its legs are stubby rather than long, and its body is only as big as a sesame seed.

To find mite harvestmen, scientists go to dark, humid forests and sift through the leaf litter. The animals respond by turning motionless, making them impossible for even a trained eye to pick out. “They look like grains of dirt,” said Gonzalo Giribet, an invertebrate biologist at Harvard.

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Predicting Oblivion: Are Existing Models Up to the Task?

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Science, August 17, 2007

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The most authoritative guide to today’s extinction crisis is a database known as the Red List. Later this month, a group of scientists will gather in England to consider whether the Red List should be opened up to species that, for the moment, show no signs of trouble. Many scientists suspect that the next few decades of global warming could push some species toward oblivion. “The concern,” says the meeting’s organizer, H. Resit Akçakaya, an ecologist at ecological software company Applied Biomathematics in Setauket, New York, “is that maybe some species that are threatened by climate are not reflected on the Red List.”

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Lessons From an Insect’s Life Cycle: Extreme Sibling Rivalry

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The New York Times, August 14, 2007

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To understand the rules that govern life, biologists often seek out the weird extremes. And when it comes to family life, it is hard to find a weirder example than that of a common wasp known as Copidosoma floridanum.

“You couldn’t dream up a more surreal life cycle than these guys have,” said Mike Strand, a professor at the University of Georgia.

Copidosoma floridanum, native throughout the United States, is a parasite. The female wasps lay one or two eggs inside the egg of the cabbage looper moth. As the host egg develops into a caterpillar, the wasp egg grows into a microscopic cluster of grapes.

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