The Cocoon. Creative Commons raindog

Note: Clarification appended

It’s not fair to review an entity one has not experienced oneself. But since the new Darwin Centre of London’s formidable Natural History Museum is in, well, London, and I am demonstrably not, nor easily got there short of a $1000 plane ticket (and I don’t expect the NHM’s going to comp me, especially after this review), I am reduced to reviewing by proxy: through the New York Times review, and my impressions thereof.

If you are not familiar with the newly opened Cocoon at the Darwin Centre, take a mosey on over to the NYT and so so here. Or check out the Darwin Centre’s web site here. In short, the Darwin Centre is the Natural History Museum’s attempt to put the museum and what it does on display in a thoroughly modern way*. Out with Victoriana, in with touch screeniana.

My chief complaint about the Darwin Centre, and its cousins like this exhibit on biodiversity at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, is that they continue the trend of ascepticizing natural history and self-gratifyingly focusing on scientists rather than the real show — the ORGANISMS.

As the New York Times says,

The research facilities and scientists are part of the exhibition; they are glimpsed through windows, framed by explanations. They even become the subject of the show. The Cocoon’s displays are not really about botany and bugs; they are about the collection and study of botany and bugs. The exhibition is really about the museum itself — its methods and materials, its passions and enterprise. I don’t know of another science museum that does this. Along the way, of course, you learn about the natural world, but the real focus is on how that world is studied, and how the museum pursues that goal.

I don’t want to paint the good folk at the NHM in a negative light. I’m sure the designers of this exhibit spent countless hours thinking it through and poring over what way they could best reach the public. They want to teach evolution, the scientific method, and how modern taxonomy works; they want to bring science to life by showing scientists in action. They were given a goal and a budget, and they did their best. I just don’t agree with the goal.

Or rather, that putting this information on display is as important or as interesting and appealing to the public as some other goals. Would you rather go to this exhibit with your child, or one about slime molds or diatoms?  In short, what bothers me most about this exhibit, and the one in San Francisco, is what they seem to say about where biological natural history education is headed. All the effort they put into this exhibit could have been put into making the world’s first Hall of Protists, or Plant Evolution Gallery, or a Bacteria and Archaea Family Album. Instead, we get swipe cards, video guides, sorting games, and generalities — and a rather narrow view of nature. Butterflies, insects, and flowers are great, but what about all the other stuff?

Personally, I find the products much more fascinating than the process. There should be a place to showcase all of them too, and not just the ones with backbones, shells, or exoskeletons. Because learning about the products, while inherently fascinating, almost always leads to questions about the process. After all, Darwin himself started there. He spent five years looking at products while aboard the Beagle.

When I write hear about yeast and their “lifestyles”, or about diatoms, or about pine pollen, or slime molds, or the sex lives of red algae, or about alien pelagic peanut creatures, I’m only scratching the tiniest surface of all the fantastic forms, creatures, structures, and lifestyles that I learned in school. And believe me when I say that *I* only scratched the surface of what’s out there. There is so much more: the fantastically beautiful filaments called slime mold elaters, for example. Hornworts. Nematode-trapping fungi. Where baby ferns come from (not adult ferns). Anglerfish and sea angels. Ping pong tree sponges. Archaea. Radiolarians. Camel spiders. Slime nets. A blizzard of protists and algae and all their mind boggling forms. These things are this blog’s raison d’etre: I want to show and tell you about them not only because I can barely contain my own excitement, but because almost no one else is, at least not in a way the general public can understand.

But I can tell you who should be: natural history museums. A few are trying. I’m particularly fond of the new Sant Ocean Hall at the Smithsonian, which I reviewed here last fall, and which makes an admirable attempt to convey biodiversity through pictures, specimens, and an armada of world-class fossils. I also quite like the evolution and fossils exhibit called “Prehistoric Journey” here in Colorado at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. My memory is hazy, but I did visit the Hall of Biodiversity at the American Museum of Natural History in New York when it was new about 10 years ago, and I seem to recall it falls somewhere between the two extremes. And, I should note, the Natural History Museum in London itself has just begun what looks to be a fascinating new exhibit (again, I have no plane ticket) on Deep Sea Biodiversity.

I am also a *huge* fan of zoos, aquariums, and botanic gardens because they do such a good job of spotlighting the organisms, but often their signage falls short: it’s vague, confusing, overly technical, overly simplistic, or boring. It doesn’t help you make connections between organisms to understand common structures, interesting adaptations, the general features of a given group, relatedness — or evolution. And lets face it: fungi, protists, bacteria, archaea, microbes, algae, lichens and kin always get the shaft. There is no where you can go to see and learn about them and their forms and variety. But there should be, and as it stands, the natural history museums are the best existing place.

But they too struggle for funding, so it frustrates me that they now seem to be prioritizing and funneling what they do have toward this new once-removed tack toward natural history. Biodiversity and natural history as monolithic concept and scientific endeavor: scattershot, sterile, and boring. Only the choir will find that engaging. The cocoon, at least it seems to me, peering into it from 5,000 miles hence, insulates people from the real stars of the show — messy, wild, weird, surprising, and natural. If we truly hope to convince the world that saving these organisms from climate change and resource depletion is important (and it is, not just for their sake, but for our sake: preserving wildlife keeps the climate stable for agriculture and our water clean for drinking), we should shove the organisms themselves out on stage. All you have to do is take a closer look at them, and with suitably skilled and creative interpreters you’ll find, I think, they sell themselves.

* The Centre was also created to specifically house the botany and entomology collections, not any other groups. I apologize for the omission, but I didn’t realize this was the case until an alert reader pointed it out.

A water lily. There is an evolutionary secret staring right at you in this picture. Can't see it? Read on to find out what it is, then come back here and click on the photo as many times as you can to see it in extreme-close-up-o-vision.

A few posts ago, I told you that star anise is interesting because it belongs to a group of plants that split from the rest of the other flowering plants early on, and that for a long time, scientists felt plants like these retained a lot of the features of the first flowers.

Scientists think that long ago, petals, carpels (the girl bits), and stamens (the boy bits) evolved from leaves. In other words, the leaves were the raw material upon which evolution acted to create a specialized cluster of sexual structures we now call flowers. By this reasoning, a flower is essentially a bunch of colored, modified leaves that the plant has packed together with its gonads at the end of a stem (a pedicel (ped’-i-sell)) for the purposes of luring insects to move pollen from flower to flower, i.e., reproduction. So yes, when you stick your nose in to inhale the perfume of a delicate flower, you are essentially shoving your sniffing nose – doggy-greeting style — into the flowers’ unmentionables.

The 3% of plants that are basal angiosperms (the group in which star anise fits) seem to have a lot of the characteristics we’d expect in first flowers. Their flower parts are usually physically separate and little changed from each other,  like magnolias or star anise or the water lily above – as if each one evolved from an individual leaf. This is not true of highly derived (changed a lot) flowers like orchids,

or this crazy pitcher plant, Nepenthes northiana, with the digital camo in the back of the pitcher and a convoluted and unified structure. Although not a flower, the pitcher is, believe it or not, a modified leaf.

Thus petals are essentially colored leaves, and the stamens of many of these groups, particularly water lilies, are essentially petals/leaves with pollen-making chambers on the ends. Some seem to defy classification as either petal or stamen. Click on the picture at the top of the page and keep clicking on it to magnify it. Look carefully at the stamens at the very edge of the bunch — they are more like purple petals with pollen making slits half way down them than true stamens.

In this photo, notice the transitional stamens toward the outside of the center – they also look like a cross between a petal and a stamen, although in this case, the pollen-making chambers (anthers) are at the tip of the petal rather than halfway down.

For a while, some scientists felt the first flowers looked very much like magnolias, hence an early term for the basal angiosperms, magnoliids. But that view is changing. Showy magnolias were probably a very early specialization.

Scientists have compared plant DNA the same way they compare flower and plant body parts and have concluded the living flower lineage that split the earliest from the rest of the living flowering plants is the diminutive (and threatened) Amborella, pictured here.

Very closely related to Amborella at the base of the tree are the water lily family, Nymphaceae (nymf-a’-see-ay), and the Austrobaileyales, the group that includes star anise (see the tree here). Plants in these groups often possess characteristics of both the two major flowering plant groups that comprise the other 97% of plants, the monocots (grasses, grains, lillies, orchids, etc.) and the eudicots (roses, apples, poppies, maples, etc.), giving scientists more confidence that they inhabit a special place at the base of the flowering plant tree.

Now scientists believe the first flower was likely to have been small, green, simple, and inconspicuous – not unlike Amborella. Nova did a special on one Chinese aquatic fossil candidate for “the world’s oldest flower” in 2007 (see a great short slide show on it here). Though it’s interesting that water lilies, also at the base of the tree (look for Nymphaeales), are also aquatic, the status of the fossil — Archaefructus, or “ancient fruit” — as “oldest flower” has been challenged. There have been other “most ancient flowers” (Bevhalstia pebja) in the past and will surely be new contenders in the future.

So, four weeks and three posts later, it may finally be becoming clear why star anise is such a surprising plant! In addition to the gorgeous and pungent whorled fruits you can use to flavor stir fry pork or decoupage your 70’s hippie bus, it is a member of one of the most ancient flowering plant lineages on Earth and could save you from one of the planet’s newest viruses.

Yes, sometime this year, we will get to see two talented actors, Paul Bettany (Master and Commander, A Beautiful Mind) and Jennifer Connelly (who was the young girl in Labyrinth, and also in A Beautiful Mind, for which she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar), portray Darwin and his wife in the new film Creation. As this year marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth (who, I believe, also shared a birthday with Abraham Lincoln), the producers have impeccable timing.

Also impeccable casting. Bettany and Connelly happen to be married in real life. And I have great faith in Bettany’s ability with this type of material: if you have never seen his turn as Darwin-class naturalist and British naval physician Dr. Stephen Maturin (who happens to get to (briefly) visit the Galapagos where he’s stunned by the diversity) in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Run, Do Not Walk. Ohhhhhh, Dr. Maturin. I’d sort your collection any time.

I am heartened by the above trailer. Finally we will have a movie that maturely deals with some pretty sticky and intersecting subjects: science, faith, and love. These are subjects that many sober-minded people find themselves painfully grappling with even today. If it’s half as good as it looks, I can’t wait.

Release is scheduled for some time this year, though the date has not been  named. Together with The Young Victoria (if they’ll ever give it a #$*@! U.S. release date!), I think we are in for a whole lot of Victorian goodness this year.

Back in May, I saw a call by a group of skeptics I belong to for talks at their annual meeting, the Colorado Skepticamp. The talks could be on any sort of skepticism OR on any discipline of science. One of my aims is to speak publicly and frequently on the sorts of things I blog about here, so I jumped at the chance. My idea was to do a quick survey of life on Earth hitting all the major groups in less than 30 minutes, so I called it (with apologies to Mel Brooks), “Life on Earth: The Short, Short Version.” So here you go — My 23 Minutes of Fame.

There are two versions. One has better sound:

And this version has higher resolution:

I made a few mistakes for which I hope you’ll forgive me. . . all I can say is this was my first time giving this presentation and it’s hard when your mouth is moving faster than your brain. I have noted them below. If, after watching it, any of you are interested in having me/hiring me as a speaker, I’d be happy to make it longer or shorter or elaborate on any taxon that interests you. : )

Errata/Clarifications

• I mentioned that Hennig changed the way we do taxonomy by suggesting evolution as our grounds for classification. What I forgot to mention is the way that evolutionary history has now become largely judged by DNA and not always so much by what the organisms look like, where they live, etc. The byzantine circular taxonomic trees I presented were created using DNA sequences – and molecular taxonomy now dominates classification (it’s not always the last word, but it’s almost always the opening sentence). But for all of our scientific efforts, judging the true evolutionary history — especially when different pieces of evidence conflict — can still be a bit of an art.
• The slide where I show some differences between bacteria and archaea shows a few of the differences between these groups, but there are many more. Don’t think by any means that these are the only two. I mentioned this earlier but not at this point.
• Flu viruses are in Orthomyxoviridae, not Paramyxoviridae. It’s the taxon directly above the one I point at. I was in the right neighborhood but again, the mouth was moving too fast for the brain. This is what happens when you try to cram life on Earth into 23 minutes.
• Operculum is Latin for a little lid or a cover, not Greek for cap. I knew what I meant, I just didn’t say it right.
• Moss spores are haploid, not diploid. Meiosis occurs in the the sporangium in the top of the sporophyte.
• I seem to imply all cup fungi shoot their spores in a cloud but that’s not accurate. Many cup fungi don’t. Even the ones that do may not if they’re not in the mood. In this respect, they aren’t so different from. . . er . . . never mind.
• I got a little confused on jellyfish but remembered soon after the talk what the problem is: jellyfish do not have alternation of generations in the same sense plants do. Both forms are diploid (the sperm and egg fuse before dividing further), but they do alternate between sexual and asexual organisms.
• And finally, I looked it up and Venus’s Girdles are indeed bioluminescent at night. Sorry.

Muchas gracias to Mile High Skeptics for making generously recording and sharing my lecture!

The online version consists of 86 photographs with crisp captions that follow the history-of-life artistic tradition of the Rite of Spring from Fantasia (check out the amoeba!) and any number of other museum murals and books. It’s a pleasing sensory experience, something akin to a brain back rub, if such a thing is possible.

I have only a few quibbles; the Cretaceous seems to have been a particularly groovy era of Earth history based on its inexplicable 70’s-game-show musical interlude, and there are a few inaccuracies (i.e. the spacing of the pictures in the time line is SO not to scale; chlorophyll does not fuel all life). But these are minor and beside the point.

He has also created a live action version featuring music by Philip Glass and “images, dance[ed. note — I’m suddenly envisioning giant isopod be-costumed dancers prancing across the stage], film, and science.” The premiere will be June 10 in New York City, and will include as guest of honor one of my three science heroes — E. O. Wilson (love you E.O.! Wish I could be there to meet you!) — along with a slew of other stars and scientists including Alan Alda, Harrison Ford, and James Watson, the Watson half of Watson and Crick (the guys who along with Rosalind Franklin figured out the structure of DNA).

The online slide show does suffer a bit from the common problems of the genre laid out by Stephen Jay Gould in the preface to his Book of Life; first, the omission of “simple” creatures like microbes, invertebrates, and fungi from the show after vertebrates appear, with the attending implication that they stop evolving after their appearance.

On the contrary. Invertebrates, fungi (actually, fungi never even appear in the show except as lichens), microbes and ferns have all continued evolving and adapting. One diorama at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science featuring conifers from the late Paleozoic/early Mesozoic shows conifers with shockingly (to my eyes) broad leaves. Needles only evolved later.

The second problem is the implication that evolution is a predictable and inevitable march of increasing superiority resulting in the evolution of Homo sapiens, the be-all end-all. It’s hard to get around this problem, though, since it’s nice to highlight major novelties (and let’s face it, flowering plants, mammalian diversification, and humans were indeed major novelties) in chronological order, and humans did arrive very late on the scene.

Finally, there is the problem of time distortion, magnified in this case by the skewed presentation of the time line. For most of Earth’s history (probably the first 3 billion years anyway), life was simple and microbial. But we get only a handful of pictures devoted to that, and dozens of pictures devoted to the last 500 million years. It’d be a pretty boring slideshow if he didn’t present it this way (if for no other reason than we don’t have much information about what that early life looked like), but it’s a distortion nonetheless. Would it be so hard to make the timeline to scale, anyway?

Check out the slideshow first, but when you are done looking at it, check out the timeline. Choosing each image reveals extras including Lanting’s notes on the pictures and often some cool bonuses like video of the geyser or stromatolites. In spite of my (and Gould’s) quibbles, it’s a first rate production!

As always, I, and I’m sure he, hope you will draw inspiration from the beauty of life to help protect it.

Discovered thanks to Carl Zimmer at The Loom.