Tag: allotrope

Busting myths with science

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

Review of David Bradley’s Deceived Wisdom

A quick, interesting read for those who like reading websites like Quora (and later having arguments in a pub). This is a book about setting the facts right. David Bradley attempts to use science and rational thinking to clear some age-old myths (like “cats are smarter than dogs“) and some modern ones (like “everyone is connected to the other through six connections“).

This “book” should really exist as well-referenced posts on a single website. Some of it exists on sciencebase.com, Bradley’s blog. There are others like snopes.com too. Perhaps what Bradley has done with the book is refine his explanations.

I somewhat agree with what Brian Clegg has to say about it: If you liken popular science books to food, Deceived Wisdom is simply not meaty enough to make it a three course meal. It is, however, a top notch box of chocolates – and who doesn’t like that?

 

Sexual strategies: The numbers game

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

In 1948 Angus John Bateman, an English geneticist, proposed that females invest more in producing and caring for their offspring than males because sperm are cheaper than eggs. Since then, however, many species, in particular egg-laying ones, have been found to violate what became known as Bateman’s principle. Such role reversal has left evolutionary biologists baffled.

Some suggeseted that species in which females lay eggs that are big compared to their bodies may need more time to recover after laying eggs and males perform nest chores to compensate. Others fingered high levels of nest predation, which prompts females to seek more males to mate with, in order to produce more offspring, and leave nests untended; again, males pick up the slack. Neither hypothesis had robust data to back it up.

In 2000 Tamas Szekely, an ornithologist at the University of Bath, put forward an alternative explanation. What determines the role adopted by each sex, Dr Szekely contends, is the ratio of males to females. Typically, females outnumber males. This means a male mates with a female once and goes off in search of another willing partner, leaving the mother to tend the nest. Where the ratio favours males, however, the fathers might care for the young rather than face stiff competition to woo another female. Since the supply of males is low, females compete for them instead.

This idea remained untested, however, mainly because finding reliable data on animal sex ratios is tricky. But Andras Liker, Dr Szekely’s colleague at the University of Sheffield, believes he has found some. For over 20 years researchers around the world have been painstakingly collecting data on waders. Studies by Dr Liker and Dr Szekely showed that the data were good enough to test the sex ratio hypothesis.

As they report in Nature Communications, wading birds’ sex roles are indeed correlated with the sex ratio in 16 of the 18 species they tested. In the five species in which females outnumber males (ruffs and northern lapwings, for instance) mothers care for their brood. In the 11 male-dominant species, including Jesus birds and greater painted snipes, by contrast, it is the fathers who look after the nestlings.

Sex ratios are, of course, in part determined by precisely the sort of behavioural traits Drs Szekely and Liker strive to explain. The reason this does not lead to a chicken-and-egg problem, as it were, is that sex ratios are also a function of other factors, like different mortality rates among adult males and females, themselves the result of things like body size.

Dr Szekely’s idea may help explain why sex-role reversal seldom happens in mammals, where sex ratios tend to favour females (though mammalian males also lack females’ ability to produce milk). It might even, Dr Liker speculates, shed light on other social behaviour in animals, such as homosexual pairing, possibly triggered byof a shortage of available partners of the opposite sex.

First published on economist.com.

Image from Greg Schneider. 

With so much good writing, is it worth struggling to write some more?

Akshat Rathi1 Comment

An editor at The Economist once remarked, as advice to me on how to write: “Aim to write a piece that gets featured on The Browser.” Edited by Robert Cottrell, The Browser is a website that recommends only five to six articles everyday, which it considers are the best of all that is published on the web that day.

Cottrell, who spends every possible hour of the day reading new content on the web, has written an article in the Financial Times that has some important lessons for young writers like us (if you can’t get through the FT paywall try this). I’ve distilled them for you here:

  1. Only 1% of all writing on the internet is great writing, and even that is an “embarrassment of riches”.
  2. Great writers produce great writing, and the bad ones cannot be rescued.
  3. His golden rule is: the writer is everything. And a corollary: the publisher (with a few exceptions) is nothing.
  4. We live in a world of ideas and they are not restricted by source or medium.

All of the above taken together paints a rather depressing picture for young writers. The honest truth is that the market we’ve entered is full of great writers who produce ever more great writing, leaving ever little time for us to find a readership for our work. Despite the difficulties, there are some ways to overcome these huge hurdles.

The antidote

To cheer myself up, here are two things that I read/watched after Cottrell’s article:

First: Robert Krulwich’s 2011 commencement speech to the Berkeley Journalism School

Krulwich shares some of  Cottrell’s views, but he serves them on a kinder platter. Krulwich says that journalism has reached a point where there are no guarantees that any big publishing house will give you a safe job, irrespective of how good you are. So if you are waiting to get picked, your chances are pretty low. Instead go out there and start doing. “There are some people who just don’t wait,” enthuses Krulwich. This is not a fanciful advice. There are examples like that of Ed Yong, Brian Switek and Alexis Madrigal, who’ve managed to build a career on their own terms.

Second: Avi Steinberg’s article in the New Yorker: Is writing torture? (on Gilbert vs Roth)

The article tells the story of Julian Tepper, a wannabe novelist, who was told by Philip Roth, an accomplished novelist, to quit writing. Roth said, “It’s an awulf field. Just torture. You write and write, and you have to throw most of it away because it’s not any good.” In response Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray and Love, wrote that there are few professions that come close to the pleasure that writing can give.

But it was Avi Steinberg’s take on the whole matter that most convinced me. He says that authors like Roth are correct in that writing can be a torture, especially if it is something that you want to make a living out of. And what Roth tried to do by dissuading Tepper was perhaps good too, because it is better to be aware of the harsh reality of being a writer than to go in to it being ignorant. It is those who can say: “Listen, I don’t care what you tell me. I know it’s a bad idea, but I’m determined to do it, and I will do it,” are those who will be able to succeed in this profession.

Science writing is not fiction, but it is still writing. And at the heart of our profession is our desire to convey thoughts and ideas, mostly through scientists’ work. But we do it because we enjoy it. We are fascinated with the world of science and we want to share stories that amaze us. That to me is enough reason to keep trying.

So what can we do get to that 1% of great writing?

Somewhere in Cottrell’s article I can smell the rotten stink of the innate talent hypothesis, which says that great writers are born to be great writers. I’m sorry but I don’t buy it. I hated English in school, but that was because fiction was not my thing. My education was structured in a way that fiction was given undue importance in writing. Then when I finally realised that non-fiction writing is just as great (if not better), I started to work on it. If I read my blog posts from two years ago, I can see myself in that writing but mostly I see how much I’ve improved since. Of course I have a long way to go, but great writing can come from lots of practice. Period.

I’ll also argue that, while the publisher may be nothing for Cottrell, it is a great place for young writers to vie to be. Great publications are great because they have fantastic editors. Even now articles that I submit to the same editors come back with lots of red marks. Every time this happens, I learn what it is that I need to improve the next time. And I’m not the only one, even accomplished writers have their work decimated. So writing for publications is not just a way of reaching an audience but also it is the secret of rapidly improving your writing.

Finally I would say that while there is a lot of science stories out there, most of them aren’t written well. For instance, it kills me a little every time when I see someone share a link to sciencedaily.com or physorg.com, which are news aggregating websites that share press releases, when some science writer has actually written a story about the same piece of research. And while Cottrell is right that we live an age where ideas matter not the source or the medium that carry them, there is a lot of value that writers can add to make the ideas clearer and spread faster.

Cottrell’s article was a nice slap in the form of a reality check, but it only makes me want to work harder and write better. And someday I know I’ll have an article featured on The Browser.

First published as a guest post on scientificamerican.com (SA Incubator blog).