He’s leaving out the bit about the low oxygen tension and what adaptations allow birds to effectively deliver oxygen at altitude. The air sac system is good for high-demand situations, where increased ventilation is needed. But if the blood is simply not able to pick up enough oxygen, the ventilation rate doesn’t matter much. This is why we need pressure suits at high altitude.
I’m sure when dinosaurs were dealing with 12% oxygen they had developed adaptations to handle it. Special hemoglobins, etc. Whatever that is, is the real reason. The efficient air sac-lung system is better at explaining how they ventilate well and deal with high winds.
Did dinosaurs really deal with 12% oxygen? I thought that atmospheric oxygen content was already somewhat higher by the time the first dinosaurs evolved.
This is the reason why hummingbirds are the most amazing creatures and their blood should be studied, more deeply.
They basically have the ability to pull in oxygen at an order of magnitude greater ppm than hemoglobin based mammals...
But their metabolism requires a really high sugar intake constantly.
But their speed and endurance is stunning, some humming birds migrate btwn north and south america....
They are also fiercely territorial - ive witnessed two fight literally two feet from me - attacking and pecking at eachother, with the loser of the battle falling on the ground... (whom i picked up and brought him to bart in an uber i was catching - he woke up and escaped my grip and i was in an uber with a hummingbird flying around... ill never forget that experience, the driver loved it)
We have a hummingbird feeder outside our kitchen window. Watching their antics all summer long is a great source of entertainment. The feeder has six feeding spots, but of course they chase each other off so that only one can feed at a time. Sometimes a wasp is at the feeder and the wasp and hummingbird tolerate each other.
>I’m sure when dinosaurs were dealing with 12% oxygen they had developed adaptations to handle it.
Dinosaurs never had to deal with 12% oxygen. Also, mammals' ancestors roamed the Earth together with dinosaurs, so they would have developed a similar adaptation if your hypothesis was true.
> MC: We think there is a dangerous situation developing, because oxygen levels have gotten higher every year and they might now be at 35 percent.
> Mr. R&D: So?
> MC: With indigestible lignin, there is nothing to keep it from continuing to go up.
This part is misleading. Evolution has no capacity to look ahead to future disasters (as the mass extinction later demonstrates). I understand that lignin digestion was evolved for the same reason we burn coal - a hitherto untapped source of engergy.
Im not sure if this is an accurate correlation, but i recall hearing;
The reason for mega flora and fauna (really large animals and plants) was due to a much higher % of oxygen in the atmosphere....
However, on the conspiracy spectrum, there was this russian kid who supposedly channeled living previously on mars who states that they had really really long life spans, but it is the fact that life on earth consumes much more oxygen, and it is oxygen that reduces overall life span - which is interesting when rated to vedic ancient books which talk of lives being ~900 years plus....
Only idiots downvote without comment...
—-
So the documentary i linked to states that hummingbirds have developed a hemoglobin that absorbs oxygen at even 6% which is the same as 40,000 feet - as compared to 21% at sea level....
Yes - but there were larger animals (including huge insects) millions of years prior to that - and many scientists suspect it's due to higher amounts of O2.
IIRC, oxygen concentration is theorized to be a factor in the large size of carboniferous insects only. Not relevant to e.g. large reptiles in later periods.
+1. Besides being a good story, the piece is also informative, and that part, unfortunately, is misinformation.
On the other hand, let me introduce a wild hypothesis:
There are millions of planets out there just like Earth, except that microorganisms there never got around to digesting lignin. Deadwood and oxygen piled up on the ground and in the atmosphere respectively, until an epic fire decimated the biosphere, and only microscopic ocean life remained, if as much. The oldest such planets light up every billion years or so. The cycle is too short for complex life to get intelligent. This process is The Great Filter [1]. Earth is the only exception.
If that's true, than Mr. R&D did care a lot about future disasters.
I had this thought while I was reading this. when he said the bit about there being so much oxygen in the atmosphere that the whole thing could light on fire, I thought, "maybe there's some planet that that happened on. maybe most planets with live have that happen eventually".
It also helps that the Himalayas have slowly grown from nothing over the past 50 million years. The ancestors of the bar-headed goose had the opportunity to gradually adapt as the mountains rose. (Not all birds can do this, even with their superior lungs.)
edit: I had assumed that the Himalayas grew gradually over 50 million years, but it turns out that the current growth rate is way too fast for that. It would take less than a million years to reach the current height. There must have been regular apocalyptic landslides in the geological history of the Himalayas to limit the height of the mountains?
Gravitational potential energy becomes sufficient to pay for rock deformation. As with toothpaste, when a pile gets sufficiently high, the bottom plastically deforms until it isn't. For a higher mountain range, you need a lower-G planet, like Mars.
This makes it sound like the elastic deformation at the bottom balances out the forces that are pushing the mountain up. But we know that this is currently not the case, because we observe the Himalayas getting several centimeters taller each year. (For the same reason, we know that gradual erosion can't be enough to counteract the growth.)
Hence my assumption that the process of the mountains growing must be reset in a catastrophic manner from time to time. I guess the stresses build up somewhere until an apocalyptic earthquake happens that takes down entire mountains, rather than a gradual toothpaste-like deformation.
> The Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau to the north have risen very rapidly. In just 50 million years, peaks such as Mt. Everest have risen to heights of more than 9 km. The impinging of the two landmasses has yet to end. The Himalayas continue to rise more than 1 cm a year -- a growth rate of 10 km in a million years! If that is so, why aren't the Himalayas even higher? Scientists believe that the Eurasian Plate may now be stretching out rather than thrusting up, and such stretching would result in some subsidence due to gravity.[1]
EDIT: Gravitational deformation creates a maximum bound near Himalayan height. But actual height below that is apparently a mix of tectonic support from the sides, above-snowline erosion, and boat floating on mantle.[2]
Having lived near Regent's park, you have to ask yourself why the birds ever leave. Surely it's clear there's way more junk food than any bird could ever want?
I’m going to call evolution “Mr. R&D.” When he finds a problem, Mr. R&D tests things out in different ways to come up with a solution. But sometimes those solutions have unforeseen consequences. So here we go!
(not quoting every other part of the article where plants form committees to decide what to do next and receive "lignin" as a ready made thing, not as an emergent result of its own evolutionary process)
Oh, no. These kind of weird anthropomorphic ideas - that evolution is actively "finding problems" and "testing solutions" - take years to remove from students' minds. And make it very unclear whether the author themselves actually do understand what they're talking about or just parroting the same story they heard.
Cue the "but it's for kids!" arguments. Kids aren't dumb, and perfectly capable of understanding selective pressure - but you are doing them a huge disservice by making them feel like they understand something when really they understand your inaccurate (yet entertaining!) story.
Yes. And I believe it's not an accident, whenever I see an article posted on HN from nautil.us I expect that the science will be twisted to the point of inducing confusion, and I believe it's an "editorial policy" which stems from the fact that they are financed by John_Templeton_Foundation (1) "a philanthropic organization that reflects the ideas of its founder, John Templeton, who became wealthy after a career as a contrarian investor and wanted to support progress in religious and spiritual knowledge, especially at the intersection of religion and science." (2)
Of course, I don't believe that every article has the same bias, but I saw it appearing with certain regularity.
This is a great way to tell the story of climate change and what led up to it. I loved the narration style, you could probably create a childrens book from it.
Was about to say the same. When I started reading I was scared of oversimplification but this piece perfectly rode the line between a whimsical read and providing scientific knowledge!
Incredible storytelling, well worth the full read. Reminds me of David Burke's Connections, where a complex history is distilled down to a gripping human-relatable narrative.
... which matters, because while the objective world is made of complex systems our subjective lives are based on narrative. We are evolved to be a storytelling species, and to have any grip on reality we need to tell the right stories well.
One of my favorite teachers in high school created an experimental class based on Connections. Sadly it conflicted with my schedule, but several of my friends could speak of little else all semester.
This trivia about Nitrogen used to be my favorite when I was studying chemistry in the school. Like there’s lot of nitrogen in the atmosphere and oxygen but they don’t “burn” because (almost all?) nitrogen oxidation is endothermic!
I can't find anything about the 43% number. It seems way too high. Most of the research on atomspheric oxygen's contribution to fire seems to focus on the 15 to 30% range, as 30% seems to be the upper limit where fires are too common and spread too much.
"Belcher’s team’s work indicates that while there is not a firm upper limit to the fire window, 30 percent is a practical limit. Burn prevalence increases only slightly between 23 and 30 percent oxygen, and fuel moisture plays an important role too. It would only be possible to have periods with atmospheric oxygen concentrations approaching 30 percent (and preserve terrestrial vegetation) if Earth were much wetter than today." [1]
If the oxygen concentration was high enough many things on the surface would burn (green plants, metal, etc.), but the air itself wouldn't. Things would probably rust like crazy too.
The Earth was scheduled to return to another ice age in about 500 years— with ice two miles thick over Boston, Chicago, Paris, and many other places. But that won’t happen now. There is already too thick of an atmospheric carbon dioxide blanket.
Um, I'm not seeing the problem here. Who wants an Ice Age?!
I mean, it'd be kinda cool if sea levels would drop and make Ice Age coast lines more accessible; I suspect the new coasts would be an archaeological treasure trove given the likelihood of our ancient ancestors having traveled and lived along the coasts of their time, most of which are now underwater.
Also, I really really hate hot weather, and wouldn't mind it being a fair bit chillier.
I’ve heard that one of the biggest shocks for new owl handlers is seeing a wet owl. Owls compact to a stick when wet. All of that bulk is just feathers.
In the case of the owl it’s acoustic insulation (deadly quiet) but there’s a reason we make feather down coats. That stuff works very well.
Then you might like Andrew H. Knoll's book Life On A Young Planet. Knoll is at Harvard. His book has a long treatment of the global change in oxygen level (which by the way makes no mention of the theory here, that woody plants did it.)
...which by the way makes no mention of the theory here, that woody plants did it.
The oxygen "event" discussed in TFA did not fall within the period covered by Knoll's book: the first 3B years of life on earth. Lignin started to pile up only after plants came along. I haven't read the book, but you're probably thinking of "The Oxygen Catastrophe", which was caused by cyanobacteria.
Then one day, Ms. VCP approached Mr. R&D and announced, "My sisters and I have had enough of your toxic masculinity. We demand that your sexist monopoly on research and development cease!" Mr. R&D pondered Ms. VCP's demand for a decade or two, then declared, "By George Eliot, I've got it! I'll simply undergo gender-reassignment surgery and adopt stereotypically feminine habits of body language and dress!" An overjoyed Ms. VCP applauded Mr. R&D's sudden embrace of his femininity, and left with a hopeful expectancy of more feminine things to come.
Mr. R&D changed his, ahem, HER name to Miss Renée Diana, then began adjusting the sexual hormone levels of every primate fetus until 100,000 years later, there were but 3 sterile but very not-so-clever and starving primates left shivering in an Iberian cave. The VNCPs formed a committee, and after 6 months of heated intersectional discussion, voted on a representative to approach Miss Renée Diana with their desperate plea.
"You rang?", replied Miss Renée Diana. "Um, no, I haven't a bell but have been screaming at the top of my lungs for a week, Miss RD. We three VNCPs, we're starving and cannot increase our population, nor compete against these damned hyper-evolved sea otters for food!" "How may I help you?", inquired Miss RD.
"Well, I used to have a working set of ovaries and lactating breasts until the starvation kicked in. We had to eat the baby. My two pals, one of them we can't tell what sex they are because they refuse to disclose. The other one has situational erectile dysfunction because, well, we can't stand his, um, I mean their, toxic display of potential male hegemony. Please, Miss Renée Diana, we implore of you, help us increase our food supply and population!"
With that, the not-so-very clever primate sat and waited for Miss RD's reply. It came 48 hours later -- astonishingly quick in historical terms, yet none too soon for the hunger-weakened VNCP. "Oh, toot-a-loo!", sang Miss Renée Diana. "Uh?", the VNCP faintly responded. "My, you look famished, poor dear. No matter. I've looked into your case and have decided that sea otters, however bipedal and adapted to your former haunts, are MUCH too adorable to allow you VNCPs to re-infest the place. Toot-a-loo!" And with that, Miss RD sashayed away with gay abandon, leaving the miserable but ideologically pure VNCPs to their fate.
Interesting that it mentioned a 3-feet wingspan dragonfly. I would have thought they were limited at their current size because of the law of aerodynamics...Now I wonder why we don't see any dragonfly based aircraft around...Fast speed plus incredible manouvering capabilities...
> The Earth was scheduled to return to another ice age in about 500 years— with ice two miles thick over Boston, Chicago, Paris, and many other places.
Can that really be true? 500 years seems awfully short for such a change.
Science and engineering, history and everyday life, are a densely interwoven tapestry of stories. Imagine teaching them like that!
But... viably teaching the tapestry, may require a much lower prevalence of misconception, and lack of insight, among teachers and texts. And creating such content, insightful and correct, is hard. Really really hard. As illustrated by the many newspaper-like "err, no, that's not quite right" errata of the OP story.
Which is one reason why sci-hub seems to me so very important (apropos a recent HN discussion). My experience is it's not even close to possible, to write such correct and insightful stories, without extensive use of the primary research literature across multiple fields. Creating such stories is already very poorly incentivized. And an awesome timesink, even by the already daunting standards of writing a book. Open access is increasingly wonderful, but only sci-hub holds at bay, for now, the additional filter of potential authors having to be simultaneously actively affiliated with a research university, and having copious free time. Without sci-hub, we're back to professors emeriti being the primary pool of potential authors.
VR/AR is a wonderful medium for storytelling. Perhaps we can use it as an excuse to begin creating wonderful stories. But it seems a nontrivial societal challenge.
Funny that you mention this. I'm developing an easy to use RPG creation tool, and it seems to catch on at schools. (The most recent to discover it are the Spanish teachers https://twitter.com/Educeria/status/1271498731544817666)
For educational games, it are mainly the students themselves that make them (see https://rpgplayground.com/educational-games/). But storytelling is indeed the most important part of it all.
I think that with the right story and game interactions, you can make a game where the player can only progress by learning something and applying that knowledge. Very interesting indeed, especially since remote learning will become more important in the future.
OT, I wonder if the shift to remote schooling is increasing the use of remote collaboration among students who speak different languages? One might imagine students localizing their game dialog with the help of remote student locals?
Oops, interesting. That's an interpretation I didn't anticipate or intend, but can now totally see. Thanks! Usually I mention "interwoven tapestry" and "storytelling" separately. I shouldn't have combined the two. Science and engineering and daily life as tightly interconnected. And separately, storytelling as an educational device that can help with teaching about them.
Which I guess still overlaps. Hmm. Maybe a key difference is in one, stories are authoritative, and in the other, the sciences are authoritative, and the stories are educational artifact and subordinate to them. One failure mode in current science education content, is content "stories" that have taken on a life of their own, decoupled from or even conflicting with, the actual science. Hmm. Tapestry of connections vs tapestry of stories?
I was thinking more of stories vaguely like "Sticky strings play a large role in cellular microbiology. They stick and unstick at energies barely above thermal noise. Lower energy, would have them shaking apart too easily. Higher, would make unsticking too expensive and slow. So we refrigerate our food, so the bacteria in it slow down. And we cook our food, so bacteria's sticky strings are shaken apart."
Determining that one can correctly (I think?) say "slow down", rather than reality and the story being something else, like the speed doesn't change, but below some temperature some activities are turned off, regrettably requires going to primary literature. Because the odds of finding that precise issue, clearly addressed, with any hope of correctness, is elsewhere low.
> But... viably teaching the tapestry, may require a much lower prevalence of misconception, and lack of insight, among teachers and texts. And creating such content, insightful and correct, is hard. Really really hard.
This is why people like James Burke ("Connections" and other documentaries) are so important.
They can do this. But this takes funding from somewhere. And it's not going to make a profit.
Some years back, I talked with someone from PBS education video, about doing interative development and user testing, as with software. Rather creating the finished video and tossing it over the wall to be seen, and even then only rarely tested.
Their comment was they'd love to do that, and would... just as soon as someone was willing to pay for it.
> viably teaching the tapestry, may require a much lower prevalence of misconception, and lack of insight, among teachers and texts.
I think in most western countries, the vast majority of actual teachers get very little say in what's taught - the content or the sequence - or how the streams are sub-divided.
The massive inertia of the education sector is not the fault of the people standing in front of the students.
Ah, ok, I was attempting a different thought. "Teaching the tapestry" seems to require atypically few misconceptions and high degree of insight. But chemistry content for example, is so bad, that teachers are steeped in misconceptions and lack insight. So not only is there, as you say, inertia, but we seemingly lack both content and staffing at present to pull off a tapestry approach. Maybe. There are bits of scattered evidence that with really good content, you can address both students and their teachers at the same time. Maybe...
Young children like stories about elephants, which are larger than most mammals, and horses, which outsprint people. Why should they not appreciate that birds are better ventilated than mammals? (after all, it's clear to anyone that the birds of the air are less vertically challenged than the beasts of the earth)
Why not? I'm pretty sure I and my friends used it at that age. Besides, even if they've never heard it before, the meaning is clear from the context, and that's often how kids learn words.
The question you are asking is not meaningful because it is possible for a childless person to know a lot about child behavior, and likewise a parent to know absolutely nothing about child behavior if they basically are letting someone else raise their kids while they go to work.
Back in the day, once upon a time bunch of toads valued their happy lovely pond of fish and stayed put. They turned out humans.
Some, valued freedom. They wanted to see what's beyond that blue yonder and where those white clouds came from. They became birds.
I regard birds to be vastly superior to humans in spirit and function. Say, what is our most proudest achievement, flying in a rocket? Yeah. They did that a million years ago.
Everything we do becomes completely irrelevant if we can become birds. Every thing. Just every thing. Completely irrelevant.
He’s leaving out the bit about the low oxygen tension and what adaptations allow birds to effectively deliver oxygen at altitude. The air sac system is good for high-demand situations, where increased ventilation is needed. But if the blood is simply not able to pick up enough oxygen, the ventilation rate doesn’t matter much. This is why we need pressure suits at high altitude.
I’m sure when dinosaurs were dealing with 12% oxygen they had developed adaptations to handle it. Special hemoglobins, etc. Whatever that is, is the real reason. The efficient air sac-lung system is better at explaining how they ventilate well and deal with high winds.
Did dinosaurs really deal with 12% oxygen? I thought that atmospheric oxygen content was already somewhat higher by the time the first dinosaurs evolved.
No they didn't. The story seems rather light on accuracy.
See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geological_history_of_oxygen and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology
This is the reason why hummingbirds are the most amazing creatures and their blood should be studied, more deeply.
They basically have the ability to pull in oxygen at an order of magnitude greater ppm than hemoglobin based mammals...
But their metabolism requires a really high sugar intake constantly.
But their speed and endurance is stunning, some humming birds migrate btwn north and south america....
They are also fiercely territorial - ive witnessed two fight literally two feet from me - attacking and pecking at eachother, with the loser of the battle falling on the ground... (whom i picked up and brought him to bart in an uber i was catching - he woke up and escaped my grip and i was in an uber with a hummingbird flying around... ill never forget that experience, the driver loved it)
We have a hummingbird feeder outside our kitchen window. Watching their antics all summer long is a great source of entertainment. The feeder has six feeding spots, but of course they chase each other off so that only one can feed at a time. Sometimes a wasp is at the feeder and the wasp and hummingbird tolerate each other.
Watch this
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/super-hummingbirds-full-epis...
“Humming birds have the highest metabolic rates of any invertebrates”
“We're sorry, but this video is not available”
Checked the transcript. Luckily, it says vertebrates :-)
Probably only available in the U.S. and maybe only if you support your local PBS station. It’s also available for purchase on DVD or iTunes.
https://shop.pbs.org/nature-super-hummingbirds-dvd/product/N...
*vertibrates
>I’m sure when dinosaurs were dealing with 12% oxygen they had developed adaptations to handle it.
Dinosaurs never had to deal with 12% oxygen. Also, mammals' ancestors roamed the Earth together with dinosaurs, so they would have developed a similar adaptation if your hypothesis was true.
Well, I’m just going by the “facts” as they are in the story.
> Mr. R&D: Hello, what I can do for you?
> MC: We think there is a dangerous situation developing, because oxygen levels have gotten higher every year and they might now be at 35 percent.
> Mr. R&D: So?
> MC: With indigestible lignin, there is nothing to keep it from continuing to go up.
This part is misleading. Evolution has no capacity to look ahead to future disasters (as the mass extinction later demonstrates). I understand that lignin digestion was evolved for the same reason we burn coal - a hitherto untapped source of engergy.
Im not sure if this is an accurate correlation, but i recall hearing;
The reason for mega flora and fauna (really large animals and plants) was due to a much higher % of oxygen in the atmosphere....
However, on the conspiracy spectrum, there was this russian kid who supposedly channeled living previously on mars who states that they had really really long life spans, but it is the fact that life on earth consumes much more oxygen, and it is oxygen that reduces overall life span - which is interesting when rated to vedic ancient books which talk of lives being ~900 years plus....
Only idiots downvote without comment...
—-
So the documentary i linked to states that hummingbirds have developed a hemoglobin that absorbs oxygen at even 6% which is the same as 40,000 feet - as compared to 21% at sea level....
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/super-hummingbirds-full-epis...
We don't have megafauna today because our ancestors ate them. Mammoths, Giant Australian birds, giant groundsloths, all disappeared when we showed up.
Yes - but there were larger animals (including huge insects) millions of years prior to that - and many scientists suspect it's due to higher amounts of O2.
IIRC, oxygen concentration is theorized to be a factor in the large size of carboniferous insects only. Not relevant to e.g. large reptiles in later periods.
Also evolution probably didn't involve any conversation or human language at all.
I think the author admits that this is tongue-in-cheek style like the short fables on how camels got their hump.
That dialogue would be quite boring if it were more precisely tuned to science.
lol, leave it to engineers to be a buzzkill. I thought the story was cute and it informed me on a few things too!
Oh jeez loueez, it's a story.
+1. Besides being a good story, the piece is also informative, and that part, unfortunately, is misinformation.
On the other hand, let me introduce a wild hypothesis: There are millions of planets out there just like Earth, except that microorganisms there never got around to digesting lignin. Deadwood and oxygen piled up on the ground and in the atmosphere respectively, until an epic fire decimated the biosphere, and only microscopic ocean life remained, if as much. The oldest such planets light up every billion years or so. The cycle is too short for complex life to get intelligent. This process is The Great Filter [1]. Earth is the only exception.
If that's true, than Mr. R&D did care a lot about future disasters.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
I had this thought while I was reading this. when he said the bit about there being so much oxygen in the atmosphere that the whole thing could light on fire, I thought, "maybe there's some planet that that happened on. maybe most planets with live have that happen eventually".
It also helps that the Himalayas have slowly grown from nothing over the past 50 million years. The ancestors of the bar-headed goose had the opportunity to gradually adapt as the mountains rose. (Not all birds can do this, even with their superior lungs.)
edit: I had assumed that the Himalayas grew gradually over 50 million years, but it turns out that the current growth rate is way too fast for that. It would take less than a million years to reach the current height. There must have been regular apocalyptic landslides in the geological history of the Himalayas to limit the height of the mountains?
> limit the height of the mountains
Gravitational potential energy becomes sufficient to pay for rock deformation. As with toothpaste, when a pile gets sufficiently high, the bottom plastically deforms until it isn't. For a higher mountain range, you need a lower-G planet, like Mars.
This makes it sound like the elastic deformation at the bottom balances out the forces that are pushing the mountain up. But we know that this is currently not the case, because we observe the Himalayas getting several centimeters taller each year. (For the same reason, we know that gradual erosion can't be enough to counteract the growth.)
Hence my assumption that the process of the mountains growing must be reset in a catastrophic manner from time to time. I guess the stresses build up somewhere until an apocalyptic earthquake happens that takes down entire mountains, rather than a gradual toothpaste-like deformation.
> The Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau to the north have risen very rapidly. In just 50 million years, peaks such as Mt. Everest have risen to heights of more than 9 km. The impinging of the two landmasses has yet to end. The Himalayas continue to rise more than 1 cm a year -- a growth rate of 10 km in a million years! If that is so, why aren't the Himalayas even higher? Scientists believe that the Eurasian Plate may now be stretching out rather than thrusting up, and such stretching would result in some subsidence due to gravity.[1]
EDIT: Gravitational deformation creates a maximum bound near Himalayan height. But actual height below that is apparently a mix of tectonic support from the sides, above-snowline erosion, and boat floating on mantle.[2]
[1] https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/himalaya.html [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01601-4 Sci-hub doesn't have the underlying paper yet.
Having lived near Regent's park, you have to ask yourself why the birds ever leave. Surely it's clear there's way more junk food than any bird could ever want?
I’m going to call evolution “Mr. R&D.” When he finds a problem, Mr. R&D tests things out in different ways to come up with a solution. But sometimes those solutions have unforeseen consequences. So here we go!
(not quoting every other part of the article where plants form committees to decide what to do next and receive "lignin" as a ready made thing, not as an emergent result of its own evolutionary process)
Oh, no. These kind of weird anthropomorphic ideas - that evolution is actively "finding problems" and "testing solutions" - take years to remove from students' minds. And make it very unclear whether the author themselves actually do understand what they're talking about or just parroting the same story they heard.
Cue the "but it's for kids!" arguments. Kids aren't dumb, and perfectly capable of understanding selective pressure - but you are doing them a huge disservice by making them feel like they understand something when really they understand your inaccurate (yet entertaining!) story.
Yes. And I believe it's not an accident, whenever I see an article posted on HN from nautil.us I expect that the science will be twisted to the point of inducing confusion, and I believe it's an "editorial policy" which stems from the fact that they are financed by John_Templeton_Foundation (1) "a philanthropic organization that reflects the ideas of its founder, John Templeton, who became wealthy after a career as a contrarian investor and wanted to support progress in religious and spiritual knowledge, especially at the intersection of religion and science." (2)
Of course, I don't believe that every article has the same bias, but I saw it appearing with certain regularity.
1) http://nautil.us/about
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Templeton_Foundation
This is a great way to tell the story of climate change and what led up to it. I loved the narration style, you could probably create a childrens book from it.
Was about to say the same. When I started reading I was scared of oversimplification but this piece perfectly rode the line between a whimsical read and providing scientific knowledge!
I've found Nautilus to (generally) be really great for that exact reason
https://www.cjr.org/cjr_outbox/nautilus-under-new-ownership-...
I just hope they end up actually paying all these excellent writers.
The author, Walter Murch, knows a thing or two about good storytelling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Murch
This is absolutely a thing I’ll read to my four year old tomorrow. He’ll love it
> Maybe if we never started burning fossil fuel, civilization would have continued along the path it was traveling in Shakespeare’s time
The path of deforesting Europe? Ok, but even without an industrial revolution, that path only runs another century or two.
Maybe with an earlier medieval civilization, and sufficient plagues and famines?
Incredible storytelling, well worth the full read. Reminds me of David Burke's Connections, where a complex history is distilled down to a gripping human-relatable narrative.
... which matters, because while the objective world is made of complex systems our subjective lives are based on narrative. We are evolved to be a storytelling species, and to have any grip on reality we need to tell the right stories well.
https://xkcd.com/2287/ is another sterling example in the "just so" genre.
James Burke.
Available for free here: https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e01
One of my favorite teachers in high school created an experimental class based on Connections. Sadly it conflicted with my schedule, but several of my friends could speak of little else all semester.
There was this line from the article:
> I see your point, because at 43 percent a lightning strike will cause the entire atmosphere to ignite since it is so high in flammable oxygen.
Is that accurate, and if so where did the 43% number come from?
I'm no chemist, but that does not seem plausible. Fire needs three things: fuel, oxidizer (e.g. oxygen), and heat. [1]
No matter how much oxygen, the atmosphere would not ignite without fuel.
Forest fires would get epic though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_triangle
If you get it hot enough, nitrogen can be oxidized. There is plenty of fuel in that sense.
Is the oxidation of nitrogen exothermic, and sufficiently so to sustain a chain reaction?
Nope, it’s endothermic as sibling pointed out!
<side>must resist the username checks out comment</aside>
Nice Apophasis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophasis
The oxidation of nitrogen gas is endothermic though. It can't produce heat to sustain a runaway reaction.
Bingo! You beat me to it.
This trivia about Nitrogen used to be my favorite when I was studying chemistry in the school. Like there’s lot of nitrogen in the atmosphere and oxygen but they don’t “burn” because (almost all?) nitrogen oxidation is endothermic!
Cool, I was actually wondering about that.
I'm no chemist but we learned in gymnasium about the dangers of having 2:1 HHO gas https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.1907.003... I can't find a better article in English
Yeah that's the thing he left out. A heckuva lot of that lignin would have burned from said lightning strikes.
Great point! So probably a biosphere ignition might have been possible.
I can't find anything about the 43% number. It seems way too high. Most of the research on atomspheric oxygen's contribution to fire seems to focus on the 15 to 30% range, as 30% seems to be the upper limit where fires are too common and spread too much.
"Belcher’s team’s work indicates that while there is not a firm upper limit to the fire window, 30 percent is a practical limit. Burn prevalence increases only slightly between 23 and 30 percent oxygen, and fuel moisture plays an important role too. It would only be possible to have periods with atmospheric oxygen concentrations approaching 30 percent (and preserve terrestrial vegetation) if Earth were much wetter than today." [1]
[1]https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/flammable-planet-fire-...
[2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3012516/
My recollection is over 30% you get continent-scale wildfires. And over 35%, even wet plants burn.
Oxygen isn't flammable: https://www.thoughtco.com/flammability-of-oxygen-608783
If the oxygen concentration was high enough many things on the surface would burn (green plants, metal, etc.), but the air itself wouldn't. Things would probably rust like crazy too.
Oxygen is not flammable. It has to combine with something that is flammable for fire to happen. In no way could the atmosphere have ignited.
So you're saying when the Manhattan Project scientists thought the atomic bomb might set the whole atmosphere on fire, they were mistaken.
The Earth was scheduled to return to another ice age in about 500 years— with ice two miles thick over Boston, Chicago, Paris, and many other places. But that won’t happen now. There is already too thick of an atmospheric carbon dioxide blanket.
Um, I'm not seeing the problem here. Who wants an Ice Age?!
I mean, it'd be kinda cool if sea levels would drop and make Ice Age coast lines more accessible; I suspect the new coasts would be an archaeological treasure trove given the likelihood of our ancient ancestors having traveled and lived along the coasts of their time, most of which are now underwater.
Also, I really really hate hot weather, and wouldn't mind it being a fair bit chillier.
I’ve heard that one of the biggest shocks for new owl handlers is seeing a wet owl. Owls compact to a stick when wet. All of that bulk is just feathers.
In the case of the owl it’s acoustic insulation (deadly quiet) but there’s a reason we make feather down coats. That stuff works very well.
This does a great job of putting evolution and geological time scales in perspective.
Then you might like Andrew H. Knoll's book Life On A Young Planet. Knoll is at Harvard. His book has a long treatment of the global change in oxygen level (which by the way makes no mention of the theory here, that woody plants did it.)
...which by the way makes no mention of the theory here, that woody plants did it.
The oxygen "event" discussed in TFA did not fall within the period covered by Knoll's book: the first 3B years of life on earth. Lignin started to pile up only after plants came along. I haven't read the book, but you're probably thinking of "The Oxygen Catastrophe", which was caused by cyanobacteria.
Then one day, Ms. VCP approached Mr. R&D and announced, "My sisters and I have had enough of your toxic masculinity. We demand that your sexist monopoly on research and development cease!" Mr. R&D pondered Ms. VCP's demand for a decade or two, then declared, "By George Eliot, I've got it! I'll simply undergo gender-reassignment surgery and adopt stereotypically feminine habits of body language and dress!" An overjoyed Ms. VCP applauded Mr. R&D's sudden embrace of his femininity, and left with a hopeful expectancy of more feminine things to come.
Mr. R&D changed his, ahem, HER name to Miss Renée Diana, then began adjusting the sexual hormone levels of every primate fetus until 100,000 years later, there were but 3 sterile but very not-so-clever and starving primates left shivering in an Iberian cave. The VNCPs formed a committee, and after 6 months of heated intersectional discussion, voted on a representative to approach Miss Renée Diana with their desperate plea.
"You rang?", replied Miss Renée Diana. "Um, no, I haven't a bell but have been screaming at the top of my lungs for a week, Miss RD. We three VNCPs, we're starving and cannot increase our population, nor compete against these damned hyper-evolved sea otters for food!" "How may I help you?", inquired Miss RD. "Well, I used to have a working set of ovaries and lactating breasts until the starvation kicked in. We had to eat the baby. My two pals, one of them we can't tell what sex they are because they refuse to disclose. The other one has situational erectile dysfunction because, well, we can't stand his, um, I mean their, toxic display of potential male hegemony. Please, Miss Renée Diana, we implore of you, help us increase our food supply and population!"
With that, the not-so-very clever primate sat and waited for Miss RD's reply. It came 48 hours later -- astonishingly quick in historical terms, yet none too soon for the hunger-weakened VNCP. "Oh, toot-a-loo!", sang Miss Renée Diana. "Uh?", the VNCP faintly responded. "My, you look famished, poor dear. No matter. I've looked into your case and have decided that sea otters, however bipedal and adapted to your former haunts, are MUCH too adorable to allow you VNCPs to re-infest the place. Toot-a-loo!" And with that, Miss RD sashayed away with gay abandon, leaving the miserable but ideologically pure VNCPs to their fate.
So this made me curious about when the first life managed to live on land. This article claims it may have been 3.2 bn years ago. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0190-9
Interesting that it mentioned a 3-feet wingspan dragonfly. I would have thought they were limited at their current size because of the law of aerodynamics...Now I wonder why we don't see any dragonfly based aircraft around...Fast speed plus incredible manouvering capabilities...
One theory is that it was possible due to more Oxygen see eg https://www.wired.com/2010/11/huge-dragonflies-oxygen
Reading this was better than reading a book. Incredible style. Gripping narration.
> The Earth was scheduled to return to another ice age in about 500 years— with ice two miles thick over Boston, Chicago, Paris, and many other places.
Can that really be true? 500 years seems awfully short for such a change.
This is HN, yet no one has raised the topic of European vs African swallows.
It's awfully cold at 30,000'. I wonder is how birds are able to keep themselves warm at those altitudes.
How does the air get into the hollow spaces in bird bones? I've never noticed it when eating chicken.
Why did the bird cross the mountain? To get to the other side!
I'll get my coat.
The fact about lings is correct. Rest is fiction.
I love this story!
Thanks so much for sharing it!
What a terrible article.
Science and engineering, history and everyday life, are a densely interwoven tapestry of stories. Imagine teaching them like that!
But... viably teaching the tapestry, may require a much lower prevalence of misconception, and lack of insight, among teachers and texts. And creating such content, insightful and correct, is hard. Really really hard. As illustrated by the many newspaper-like "err, no, that's not quite right" errata of the OP story.
Which is one reason why sci-hub seems to me so very important (apropos a recent HN discussion). My experience is it's not even close to possible, to write such correct and insightful stories, without extensive use of the primary research literature across multiple fields. Creating such stories is already very poorly incentivized. And an awesome timesink, even by the already daunting standards of writing a book. Open access is increasingly wonderful, but only sci-hub holds at bay, for now, the additional filter of potential authors having to be simultaneously actively affiliated with a research university, and having copious free time. Without sci-hub, we're back to professors emeriti being the primary pool of potential authors.
VR/AR is a wonderful medium for storytelling. Perhaps we can use it as an excuse to begin creating wonderful stories. But it seems a nontrivial societal challenge.
Funny that you mention this. I'm developing an easy to use RPG creation tool, and it seems to catch on at schools. (The most recent to discover it are the Spanish teachers https://twitter.com/Educeria/status/1271498731544817666)
For educational games, it are mainly the students themselves that make them (see https://rpgplayground.com/educational-games/). But storytelling is indeed the most important part of it all.
I think that with the right story and game interactions, you can make a game where the player can only progress by learning something and applying that knowledge. Very interesting indeed, especially since remote learning will become more important in the future.
OT, I wonder if the shift to remote schooling is increasing the use of remote collaboration among students who speak different languages? One might imagine students localizing their game dialog with the help of remote student locals?
> Science and engineering, history and everyday life, are a densely interwoven tapestry of stories. Imagine teaching them like that!
That's exactly what First Nations people all around the world have been doing for about 200,000 years!
Oops, interesting. That's an interpretation I didn't anticipate or intend, but can now totally see. Thanks! Usually I mention "interwoven tapestry" and "storytelling" separately. I shouldn't have combined the two. Science and engineering and daily life as tightly interconnected. And separately, storytelling as an educational device that can help with teaching about them.
Which I guess still overlaps. Hmm. Maybe a key difference is in one, stories are authoritative, and in the other, the sciences are authoritative, and the stories are educational artifact and subordinate to them. One failure mode in current science education content, is content "stories" that have taken on a life of their own, decoupled from or even conflicting with, the actual science. Hmm. Tapestry of connections vs tapestry of stories?
I was thinking more of stories vaguely like "Sticky strings play a large role in cellular microbiology. They stick and unstick at energies barely above thermal noise. Lower energy, would have them shaking apart too easily. Higher, would make unsticking too expensive and slow. So we refrigerate our food, so the bacteria in it slow down. And we cook our food, so bacteria's sticky strings are shaken apart."
Determining that one can correctly (I think?) say "slow down", rather than reality and the story being something else, like the speed doesn't change, but below some temperature some activities are turned off, regrettably requires going to primary literature. Because the odds of finding that precise issue, clearly addressed, with any hope of correctness, is elsewhere low.
> But... viably teaching the tapestry, may require a much lower prevalence of misconception, and lack of insight, among teachers and texts. And creating such content, insightful and correct, is hard. Really really hard.
This is why people like James Burke ("Connections" and other documentaries) are so important.
They can do this. But this takes funding from somewhere. And it's not going to make a profit.
But it will make for a better society.
Some years back, I talked with someone from PBS education video, about doing interative development and user testing, as with software. Rather creating the finished video and tossing it over the wall to be seen, and even then only rarely tested.
Their comment was they'd love to do that, and would... just as soon as someone was willing to pay for it.
> viably teaching the tapestry, may require a much lower prevalence of misconception, and lack of insight, among teachers and texts.
I think in most western countries, the vast majority of actual teachers get very little say in what's taught - the content or the sequence - or how the streams are sub-divided.
The massive inertia of the education sector is not the fault of the people standing in front of the students.
Ah, ok, I was attempting a different thought. "Teaching the tapestry" seems to require atypically few misconceptions and high degree of insight. But chemistry content for example, is so bad, that teachers are steeped in misconceptions and lack insight. So not only is there, as you say, inertia, but we seemingly lack both content and staffing at present to pull off a tapestry approach. Maybe. There are bits of scattered evidence that with really good content, you can address both students and their teachers at the same time. Maybe...
"I'm sure when birds get together, they gossip abou how pathetic our lungs are"
How is this a book for young children?
Young children like stories about elephants, which are larger than most mammals, and horses, which outsprint people. Why should they not appreciate that birds are better ventilated than mammals? (after all, it's clear to anyone that the birds of the air are less vertically challenged than the beasts of the earth)
I don't expect someone under the age of 9 to understand what the word pathetic means.
Why not? I'm pretty sure I and my friends used it at that age. Besides, even if they've never heard it before, the meaning is clear from the context, and that's often how kids learn words.
So I just asked an 8 year old as an experiment: “it’s... like if you have to do something and you just fail epically, that’s pathetic”
Thought that was pretty good - so not too difficult.
You don't have kids, do you?
The question you are asking is not meaningful because it is possible for a childless person to know a lot about child behavior, and likewise a parent to know absolutely nothing about child behavior if they basically are letting someone else raise their kids while they go to work.
I think my 3 year old niece is already using that word in context.
My bet would be the opposite. The term is heavily used in TV series and advertising for children
Back in the day, once upon a time bunch of toads valued their happy lovely pond of fish and stayed put. They turned out humans.
Some, valued freedom. They wanted to see what's beyond that blue yonder and where those white clouds came from. They became birds.
I regard birds to be vastly superior to humans in spirit and function. Say, what is our most proudest achievement, flying in a rocket? Yeah. They did that a million years ago.
Everything we do becomes completely irrelevant if we can become birds. Every thing. Just every thing. Completely irrelevant.