Natural wonders

by Martín Bonfil Olivera
Published on Milenio Diario, March 25, 2009

I have just been to one of the 13 wonders of Mexico: the basalt prisms of Santa María Regla, in the state of Hidalgo.

When he came to Mexico in 1803, Alexander von Humboldt visited these impressive 30 meter basalt columns, of perfec hexagonal shape, that border a ravine as if God had arranged them like giants pencils. They're breathtaking.

But for a naturalist such as Humboldt, and for a relentless atheist like this columnist, the divine explanation is not satisfactory: it doesn't really explain anything. Could there be a natural process that allows hundreds of hexagonal prisms to be formed and carefully stacked ?

Basalt prisms, although rare, are not unique. There are 10 or 15 sites in the world with similar structures: the “giant's causeway”, in Ireland; the “Devils postpile”, in California; the “organ pipes”, in Australia… The formation of these structures doesn't seem to be that difficult.

A second hint is the hexagonal shape of the prisms. There is an old saying in northern Mexico, "as the wagon moves, the watermelons arrange themselves", that accurately applies to this case: spheres tend to accommodate spontaneously so that each one is surrounded by twelve more: it is the most compact arrangement. In the case of circles, the most efficient arrangement is hexagonal: the most compact form to arrange cylindrical columns is so that each one is surrounded by other 6. The hexagonal shape of the prisms is the result of this arrangement. They weren’t constructed and then arranged: they formed in their actual position.

And how could melted lava —basalt is solidified magma— form individual vertical prisms? The answer relies in the existence of self- organized structures in nature. "Bénard cells" are example : when heating a liquid from below, the convection movement —hot water goes up and cold goes down— can form hexagonal columns of water that keep circulating as long as there's a temperature difference. Prisms are fossilized convection cells that were solidified when they quickly cooled down.

The mineral world can form marvelous and arranged structures. The same thing occurs, but augmented, in the living world. Darwin, another naturalist, saw it and explained it. Because of this, and more the basalt prisms of Hidalgo are really worth visiting.

(Take a look at my pictures of the basalt prisms here)

(translated by Adrián Robles Benavides)

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Scientific pyramids

by Martín Bonfil Olivera
Published on Milenio Diario, March 18, 2009

In view of Bernard Madoff's financial fraud scandal (not really a "pyramid", because it did'nt have levels; it was a "Ponzi scheme", since Maddoff was in direct contact with all his victims) one could ask wheter similar cases happen in science.

In his classic book The demon haunted world, astronomer and science writer Carl Sagan explains that "science requires the free interchange of ideas; its values are opposed to secrecy."

Values that, he adds, that it shares with democracy.

Such a system is necessarily based on trust. And where there's trust, there can be fraud. Last Thursday, in this same space, mi friend Horacio Salazar talked about how a single dishonest scientist can place at risk a whole area of science (in this case, algiology, the study of pain, where it was discovered that at least 21 research articles by Scott Reuben, a renowned  anesthesiologist, contained fake data).

Although science has some quality control mechanisms, such as the peer review process all articles undergo before being published, it's impossible to check every minute detail. And since the evaluation and salary system for researchers demands as many articles as possible ("publish o perish"), the temptation —and the opportunity— for frauds is always at hand.

On the same Thursday, scholar Wietse de Vries, from Puebla's Autonomous University reflects in Milenio Campus supplement about the similarity between the "academic publication industry", based on trust, with a Ponzi scheme (named after Charles Ponzi, the Italian immigrant that discovered how easy it was make frauds thanks to the trust of his fellow citizens and the rules of the financial system, which allows people to get rich not with money, but with the promise of money, as explained by Carlos Mota also on Thursday on Milenio.

Researchers, de Vries explains, write articles which are evaluated by their colleagues (and vice versa); then these colleagues quote, in their own articles, the articles they've reviewed. The system rewards publications and quotes: the more there are, the more benefit for everyone involved.

I'm not sure whether de Vries's analogy is well founded, but it wouldn't do any harm for scientists to  review —they're already doing it— their evaluation and fraud control systems.

(Figure: taken from PhD Comics, Jorge Cham's great comic strip about graduate student life)

(translated by Adrián Robles Benavides)

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Women and washing machines

by Martín Bonfil Olivera
Published in Milenio Diario, March 11, 2009

In 2006, in a tour in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, former president Vicente Fox proudly mentioned that seventy-five per cent of the homes in Mexico have a washing machine, "and made of metal, not the kind with two hands and two legs". This injurious phrase showed that the former president's concept of woman reduced to "a person that washes clothes".

Last Sunday, International Women's Day, pope Benedict XVI asked for women "to be more respected and valued every day". The same day, The Vatican's official newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, published that women should give thanks for the washing machine because "this humble domestic appliance had done more for the women’s liberation movement than the contraceptive pill". Apparently, the Vatican values women more or less as much as Fox.

It's true that scientific-technological products –including washing machines, among other domestic without which housework would be worse than it already is– have contributed to diminish social inequality between man and woman (which still persists). What's indignant is to find people that still think that such labors are a natural obligation on women.

But it's undeniable that the fact that women, for the first time in history, are able to reliably control their pregnancies was one of the triggers of the revolution that radically changed their role in society –although, there's still way to go. Chemist Carl Djerassi, one of the fathers of the pill, reflects on these and other social consequences of his invention in his excellent book This man's pill.

On the other hand, science writer Ana María Sánchez Mora , in a penetrating book that should've been named Feminism and science popularization, but because of a bad editorial decision carries the ambiguous name Science and sex (La ciencia y el sexo), explains how science, apart from refuting some beliefs like witchcraft or the biological inferiority of women, of ending women's deaths from puerperal fever and producing the pill, gave women the knowledge and arguments to denounce and fight discrimination and abuses against them.

Science not only makes useful products. It also changes the way we see the world.

(translated by Adrián Robles Benavides)

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Do species exist?

by Martín Bonfil Olivera
Published on Milenio Diario, March 4, 2009

Lots of people find their fun trying to demonstrate that science's big theories are wrong. Einstein's relativity and Darwin's evolution by natural selection are two old time favorites.

Since science does not offer absolute truths, but simply knowledge that is reliable and useful, but that is in constant evolution, there's always the possibility that these critics are right. However, the usual thing is that, to begin with, they don’t have a good understanding of the theories they intend to overthrow.

One of the most common misunderstandings of Darwin's theory is the definition of a biological species. His book On the origin of species shows how they emerge, but Darwin's explanation —the varieties that appear within the same species are actually "incipient species" which, little by little, can get separated from the original— sound looks confusing. A species turns into another? When can we precisely talk about a new species? What is the difference between species, subspecies, varieties and race?

The problem is that we do not normally think in terms of populations, but of individuals. A friend of mine says he is convinced that there had to be a first human being, born from a "still not human" mother. He thinks that between both species —human and pre-human— there is a well defined border that can be crossed in one step (like the mutation that originated the Ninja Turtles)

The idea is not a dumb one: these first individuals of a new species were known as "hopeful monsters" for a long time. But, although their existence is possible, they are extremely rare cases. The normal way of things in evolution, by far, is the gradual accumulation of minimum changes that make the task of defining when a variety turns into a new species as hard as saying with precision just how many hairs a man must loose to call him bald.

In his revealing book Darwin's dangerous idea, philosopher Daniel Dennett explains that in reality, what allow us to distinguish between one species and another is the absence of intermediate individuals between two populations. When there is continuity between both, we realize that the definition of species is, in reality, a human abstraction. We'll talk more about this.

(translated by Adrián Robles Benavides)

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Science doesn't matter

by Martín Bonfil Olivera
Published on Milenio Diario, February 25, 2009
The economy is a Darwinian system. But when neoliberal economists talk about the "principles of the free market" like as if these were natural laws, they forget that the economy is not a natural system, but a human one; therefore, it should be subject to ethics.

Darwin explained that the natural thing is for the more apt to survive and the inept to extinguish. However, we humans consciously choose to go against natural selection, and give glasses to the short-sighted and insulin to the diabetics. Not because it is "natural", but because it's human. It's important to remember this when dealing with the economy, before taking decisions based only in monetary interests.

A clear case is the crisis that currently affects science journalism. Journalism, apart from being a business, has a social function that is fundamental for a democracy, and which gives it sense: to give the citizens information that allows them to form their opinions and take decisions (if not, it's better to sell doughnuts, a much simpler and secure business).

In particular, science journalism democratizes science and allows common citizens, not only business people and scientists, to participate of the discoveries and to be involved in decisions that might have grave social and environment effects.

But the economic crisis has caused numerous media in the world to reduce the spaces they devote to science. One of the most notable cases is CNN, which last December cut the entire staff (seven people) of their science, technology and environment department.

In México, last week Reforma, one of the country's major newspapers, decided to eliminate its science printed pages. They will not fire their reporters, and they assure (just like CNN) that science stories will continue to appear, distributed in other sections of the newspaper, but the "high price of paper" forced them to make the cuts.

Reforma had already cancelled its excellent book supplement, Hoja por hoja. In times of crisis, science —and culture— still don't matter. Unfortunately, the media lack a scientific perspective: in the short term, cuts can be justified; in the long term, only a scientific and technical culture in all citizens can save the country from recurrent economical crises. Bad news. What a shame.

(translated by Adrián Robles Benavides)

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Darwin, wrong?

by Martín Bonfil Olivera
Published on Milenio Diario, February 18, 2009

A kind but pressing reader is worried because, by reading what several science writers, including me, have published about the ideas of Charles Darwin, and comparing it with what he wrote in his books On the origin of species and The descent of man, he finds discrepancies.

He is concerned because some sentences from Darwin can be read to say that human beings are superior to other species, and that they descend from monkeys (which is of course wrong: man and money descend from the same ancestor, not from one another; moreover, species can be well or badly adapted to their environment, but there can be no talk of superiority in absolute terms).

Although Darwin did not say that, he did write things that we now know to be wrong. In part because in later editions he incorporated some changes as a concession to criticism from religious thinkers, changes that introduced confusion in some terms.

On the other hand, in the 150 years since the publication of The origin, knowledge has advanced a lot. The mechanism of inheritance, a key component of his theory of evolution by natural selection, was unknown. For lack of a better explanation, he proposed a hypothesis (pangenesis) to explain it; he was wrong. The correct mechanism —genes— was discovered by the monk Gregor Mendel around the same time Darwin was publishing his book, but it was forgotten and was not re-discovered until 1900.

Genetics was incorporated to Darwinian theory and gave rise to population genetics, and the modernization of evolutionary theory continued during the 30's and 40's up to the "modern synthesis" or synthetic theory of evolution.

Finding ideas that sound wrong in Darwin's texts shouldn't come as a surprise: like any scientific theory, his has been corrected, refined and elaborated. If Darwin could read a modern evolutionary biology book, he would be surprised, but not worried: he'd be happy to see that, far from being taken as an unmoving dogma, his ideas have been part of the evolutionary process that gives science its power not to find absolute truths, but to generate theories in constant change that aspire to describe, in the best way possible, the natural world.

(translated by Adrián Robles Benavides)

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A Toast to Darwin!

by Martín Bonfil Olivera
Published in Milenio Diario, February 12, 2009

Today is the big day. We celebrate that 200 years ago, Charles Robert Darwin was born. Fifty years later he would publish On the origin of species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life, the book that turned biology into a full blown science, giving it the conceptual backbone that supports and gives sense to the whole of biological knowledge.

We celebrate the man, but we must also celebrate the idea (an idea that another man, Alfred Russell Wallace, also had, although sadly he will not receive any tributes: history only remembers first places, not seconds).

Darwin's great idea —natural selection as the mechanism that allows species to change, adapting to their environment— has turned out to be, during these 150 years, very polemic. This is due to three public-relations problems it has.

First off, it's an idea that, although simple —the better adapted organisms inherit their advantages to their descendants, which become predominant in the population— is anti-intuitive. Selection allows advantageous changes, produced by chance and inherited from parents to descendants, to accumulate. The reiterated variation-selection process produces, with time, designs that appear to be the product of an intelligence. It is hard to accept that complex creations such as the wing of a bird or the human brain —and the mind— are the results of a blind mechanism.

Second, Darwin's idea is naturalistic: compared to religion, it gives a completely natural —almost mechanical— explanation to the wonderful variety and amazing adaptations of living beings. To abandon a simple and comforting explanation (creation by a superior being) and substitute it by a natural process can be seen as a threat to religious faith. Maybe it is.

Finally, Darwin's idea is powerful. It's applicable not only in biology, but in economy, computing, cultural studies, medicine, chemistry, engineering, sociology, philosophy… That's why it's been described as "dangerous".

However, no matter the reluctances, today, the importance of this idea is undeniable, and its applications are more important every day. That's why Darwin well deserves that we toast to his memory. Cheers!

(translated by Adrián Robles Benavides)

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