The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011

by Mary Roach

  What all this comes down to is that the very idea of artificial intelligence gives us the cover to avoid accountability by pretending that machines can take on more and more human responsibility. This holds for things that we don't even think of as artificial intelligence, like the recommendations made by Netflix and Pandora. Seeing movies and listening to music suggested to us by algorithms is relatively harmless, I suppose. But I hope that once in a while the users of those services resist the recommendations; our exposure to art shouldn't be hemmed in by an algorithm that we merely want to believe predicts our tastes accurately. These algorithms do not represent emotion or meaning, only statistics and correlations.

  What makes this doubly confounding is that while Silicon Valley might sell artificial intelligence to consumers, our industry certainly wouldn't apply the same automated techniques to some of its own work. Choosing design features in a new smartphone, say, is considered too consequential a game. Engineers don't seem quite ready to believe in their smart algorithms enough to put them up against Apple's chief executive, Steve Jobs, or some other person with a real design sensibility.

  But the rest of us, lulled by the concept of ever more intelligent AI's, are expected to trust algorithms to assess our aesthetic choices, the progress of a student, the credit risk of a homeowner or an institution. In doing so, we only end up misreading the capability of our machines and distorting our own capabilities as human beings. We must instead take responsibility for every task undertaken by a machine and double-check every conclusion offered by an algorithm, just as we always look both ways when crossing an intersection, even though the light has turned green.

  When we think of computers as inert, passive tools instead of people, we are rewarded with a clearer, less ideological view of what is going on—with the machines and with ourselves. So, why, aside from the theatrical appeal to consumers and reporters, must engineering results so often be presented in a Frankensteinian light?

  The answer is simply that computer scientists are human and are as terrified by the human condition as anyone else. We, the technical elite, seek some way of thinking that gives us an answer to death, for instance. This helps explain the allure of a place like the Singularity University. The influential Silicon Valley institution preaches a story that goes like this: one day in the not-so-distant future, the Internet will suddenly coalesce into a super-intelligent AI, infinitely smarter than any of us individually and all of us combined; it will become alive in the blink of an eye and take over the world before humans even realize what's happening.

  Some think the newly sentient Internet would then choose to kill us; others think it would be generous and digitize us the way Google is digitizing old books, so that we can live forever as algorithms inside the global brain. Yes, this sounds like many different science-fiction movies. Yes, it sounds nutty when stated so bluntly. But these are ideas with tremendous currency in Silicon Valley; these are guiding principles, not just amusements, for many of the most influential technologists.

  It should go without saying that we can't count on the appearance of a soul-detecting sensor that will verify that a person's consciousness has been virtualized and immortalized. There is certainly no such sensor with us today to confirm metaphysical ideas about people, or even to recognize the contents of the human brain. All thoughts about consciousness, souls, and the like are bound up equally in faith, which suggests something remarkable: what we are seeing is a new religion, expressed through an engineering culture.

  What I would like to point out, though, is that a great deal of the confusion and rancor in the world today concerns tension at the boundary between religion and modernity—whether it's the distrust among Islamic or Christian fundamentalists of the scientific worldview or even the discomfort that often greets progress in fields like climate-change science or stem-cell research.

  If technologists are creating their own ultramodern religion, and it is one in which people are told to wait politely as their very souls are made obsolete, we might expect further and worsening tensions. But if technology were presented without metaphysical baggage, is it possible that modernity would not make people as uncomfortable?

  Technology is essentially a form of service. We work to make the world better. Our inventions can ease burdens, reduce poverty and suffering, and sometimes even bring new forms of beauty into the world. We can give people more options to act morally, because people with medicine, housing, and agriculture can more easily afford to be kind than those who are sick, cold, and starving.

  But civility, human improvement, these are still choices. That's why scientists and engineers should present technology in ways that don't confound those choices.

  We serve people best when we keep our religious ideas out of our work.

  The Love That Dare Not Squawk Its Name

  Jon Mooallem

  FROM The New York Times Magazine

  THE LAYSAN ALBATROSS is a downy seabird with a seven-foot wingspan and a notched, pale yellow beak. Every November a small colony of albatrosses assembles at a place called Kaena Point, overlooking the Pacific at the foot of a volcanic range on the northwestern tip of Oahu, Hawaii. Each bird has spent the past six months in solitude, ranging over open water as far north as Alaska, and has come back to the breeding ground to reunite with its mate. Albatrosses can live to be sixty or seventy years old and typically mate with the same bird every year, for life. Their "divorce rate," as biologists term it, is among the lowest of any bird.

  When I visited Kaena Point in November, the first birds were just returning, and they spent a lot of their time gliding and jackknifing in the wind a few feet overhead or plopped like cushions in the sand. There are about 120 breeding albatrosses in the colony, and gradually each will arrive and feel out the crowd for the one other particular albatross it has been waiting to have sex with again. At any given moment in the days before Thanksgiving, some birds may be just turning up while others sit there killing time. It feels like an airport baggage-claim area.

  Once together, pairs will copulate and collaboratively incubate a single egg for sixty-five days. They take shifts: one bird has to sit at the nest while the other flaps off to fish and eat for weeks at a time. Couples preen each other's feathers and engage in elaborate mating behaviors and displays. "Like when you're in a couple," Marlene Zuk, a biologist who has visited the colony, explained to me. "All those sickening things that couples do that gross out everyone else but the two people in the couple?...Birds have the same thing." I often saw pairs sitting belly to belly, arching their necks and nuzzling their heads together to form a kind of heart shape. Speaking on Oahu a few years ago as first lady, Laura Bush praised Laysan albatross couples for making lifelong commitments to one another. Lindsay C. Young, a biologist who studies the Kaena Point colony, told me: "They were supposed to be icons of monogamy: one male and one female. But I wouldn't assume that what you're looking at is a male and a female."

  Young has been researching the albatrosses on Oahu since 2003; the colony was the focus of her doctoral dissertation at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, which she completed last spring. (She now works on conservation projects as a biologist for hire.) In the course of her doctoral work, Young and a colleague discovered, almost incidentally, that a third of the pairs at Kaena Point actually consisted of two female birds, not one male and one female. Laysan albatrosses are one of countless species in which the two sexes look basically identical. It turned out that many of the female-female pairs, at Kaena Point and at a colony that Young's colleague studied on Kauai, had been together for four, eight, or even nineteen years—as far back as the biologists' data went in some cases. The female-female pairs had been incubating eggs together, rearing chicks, and just generally passing under everybody's nose for what you might call "straight" couples.

  Young would never use the phrase "straight couples." And she is adamantly against calling the other birds "lesbians" too. For one thing, the same-sex pairs appear to do everything male-female pairs
do except have sex, and Young isn't really sure, or comfortable judging, whether that technically qualifies them as lesbians or not. Moreover, the whole question is meaningless to her; it has nothing to do with her research. "Lesbian," she told me, "is a human term," and Young—a diligent and cautious scientist, just beginning to make a name in her field—is devoted to using the most aseptic language possible and resisting any tinge of anthropomorphism. "The study is about albatross," she told me firmly. "The study is not about humans." Often she seemed to be mentally peer-reviewing her words before speaking.

  A discovery like Young's can disorient a wildlife biologist in the most thrilling way—if he or she takes it seriously, which has traditionally not been the case. Various forms of same-sex sexual activity have been recorded in more than 450 different species of animals by now, from flamingos to bison to beetles to guppies to warthogs. A female koala might force another female against a tree and mount her, while throwing back her head and releasing what one scientist described as "exhalated belchlike sounds." Male Amazon River dolphins have been known to penetrate each other in the blowhole. Within most species, homosexual sex has been documented only sporadically, and there appear to be few cases of individual animals who engage in it exclusively. For more than a century, this kind of observation was usually tacked onto scientific papers as a curiosity, if it was reported at all, and not pursued as a legitimate research subject. Biologists tried to explain away what they'd seen or dismissed it as theoretically meaningless—an isolated glitch in an otherwise elegant Darwinian universe where every facet of an animal's behavior is geared toward reproducing. One primatologist speculated that the real reason two male orangutans were fellating each other was nutritional.

  In recent years, though, more biologists have been looking objectively at same-sex sexuality in animals—approaching it as real science. For Young, the existence of so many female-female albatross pairs disproved assumptions that she didn't even realize she'd been making and, in the process, raised a chain of progressively more complicated questions. One of the prickliest, it seemed, was how a scientist is supposed to talk about any of this, given how eager the rest of us have been to twist the sex lives of animals into allegories of our own. "This colony is literally the largest proportion of—I don't know what the correct term is: 'homosexual animals'?—in the world," Young told me. "Which I'm sure some people think is a great thing, and others might think is not."

  It was a guarded understatement. Two years ago, Young decided to write a short paper with two colleagues on the female-female albatross pairs. "We were pretty careful in the original article to plainly and simply report what we found," she said. "It's definitely a little bit of a tricky subject, and one you want to be gentle on." But the journal that published the paper, Biology Letters, sent out a press release a few days after the California Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. At six the next morning, a Fox News reporter called Young on her cell phone. The resulting story joined others, including one in the New York Times, and as the news ricocheted around the Internet, a stampede of online commenters alternately celebrated Young's findings as a clear call for equality or denigrated them as "pure propaganda and selective science at its dumbest" and "an effort to humanize animals or devolve humans to the level of animals or to further an agenda." Many pointed out that animals also rape or eat their young; was America going to tolerate that too, just because it's "natural"?

  A Denver-based publication for gay parents welcomed any and all new readers from "the extensive lesbian albatross parent community." The conservative Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn highlighted Young's paper on his website under the heading "Your Tax Dollars at Work," even though her study of the female-female pairs was not actually federally financed. Stephen Colbert warned on Comedy Central that "albatresbians" were threatening American family values with their "Sappho-avian agenda." A gay rights advocate e-mailed Young, asking her to fly a rainbow flag above each female-female nest to identify them and show solidarity. Even now, the first thing everyone wants to know from Young—sometimes the only thing—is, what does the existence of these lesbian albatrosses say about us?

  "I don't answer that question," she told me.

  A female Laysan albatross is physically capable of laying only one egg per year—that's just how it's built. Nevertheless, since as early as 1919, biologists have periodically found nests of albatrosses (and similar species of birds) with two eggs inside or with a second egg just outside the nest, as if it had rolled out. (This will inevitably happen; there's simply not enough room in the nest for two eggs and one Laysan albatross.) Scientists have a term for the phenomenon of extra eggs in a nest: a "supernormal clutch." But in the case of the albatross, they never had a watertight explanation.

  In the early 1960s, one ornithologist tried to put the whole cumbersome mystery to rest by asserting that some of those female birds must simply be able to lay multiple eggs. The claim was apparently based on sketchy data, but supernormal clutches were so rare that it was hard to rack up enough observations to disprove the hypothesis. Real progress was finally made in 1968, when Harvey Fisher, a dean of midcentury albatross science, reported on seven years of daily observations made at 3,440 different nests on the Midway atoll in the middle of the Pacific. Fisher concluded that "two eggs in a nest are an indication that two females used the nest, although at different times." He was describing "egg dumping," whereby, for example, an inexperienced female accidentally lays her egg in the wrong nest. From then on, egg dumping was a default explanation for supernormal clutches in albatrosses. After all, Fisher had also declared that "promiscuity, polygamy and polyandry are unknown in this species." Lesbianism apparently never occurred to anyone—even enough to be cursorily dismissed. As Brenda Zaun recently told me, "It never dawned on anyone to sex the birds."

  Zaun, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was studying a Laysan colony on Kauai forty years after Fisher's publication. She realized that certain nests there seemed to wind up with two eggs in them year after year; the distribution of the supernormal clutches wasn't random, as it would presumably be if it were caused exclusively by egg dumping. On a hunch, Zaun pulled feathers from a sample of the breeding pairs associated with two-egg nests and sent them to Lindsay Young, asking her to draw DNA from the feathers and genetically determine the sexes of those birds in her lab. When the results showed that every bird was female, Young figured she'd messed up. So she did it again—and got the same result. Then she genetically sexed every bird at Kaena Point. "Where it wasn't totally clear, or I worried that maybe I mixed up the sample, I actually went back into the field and took new blood samples to do it again," Young told me. In the end she genetically sexed the birds in her lab four times, just to be sure. She found that 39 of the 125 nests at Kaena Point since 2004 belonged to female-female pairs, including more than 20 nests in which she'd never noticed a supernormal clutch. It seemed that certain females were somehow findi ng opportunities to quickly copulate with males but incubating their eggs—and doing everything else an albatross does while at the colony—with other females.

  Young gave a talk about these findings at an international meeting of Pacific-seabird researchers. "There was a lot of murmuring in the room," she remembers. "Then, afterward, people were coming up to me and saying: 'We see supernormal clutches all the time. We assumed it was a male and a female.' And I'd say: 'Yeah? Well, you might want to look into that.'" Recently, journals have asked her to confidentially peer-review new papers about other species, describing similar discoveries. "I can't say which species," she explains, "but my guess is, in the next year, we're going to see a lot more examples of this."

  It may seem surprising that scientists sometimes don't know the true sexes of the animals they spend their careers studying—that they can be tripped up in some Tootsie-like farce for so long. But it's easy to underestimate the pandemonium that they're struggling to interpret in the wild. Often biologists are forced to assign sexes to animals by watching what they do wh
en they mate. When one albatross or boar or cricket rears up and mounts a second, it would seem to be advertising the genders of both. Unless, of course, that's not the situation at all.

  "There is still an overall presumption of heterosexuality," the biologist Bruce Bagemihl told me. "Individuals, populations, or species are considered to be entirely heterosexual until proven otherwise." While this may sound like a reasonable starting point, Bagemihl calls it a "heterosexist bias" and has shown it to be a significant roadblock to understanding the diversity of what animals actually do. In 1999 Bagemihl published Biological Exuberance, a book that pulled together a colossal amount of previous piecemeal research and showed how biologists' biases had marginalized animal homosexuality for the last 150 years—sometimes innocently enough, sometimes in an eruption of anthropomorphic disgust. Courtship behaviors between two animals of the same sex were persistently described in the literature as "mock" or "pseudo" courtship—or just "practice." Homosexual sex between ostriches was interpreted by one scientist as "a nuisance" that "goes on and on." One man, studying Mazarine Blue butterflies in Morocco in 1987, regretted having to report "the lurid details of declining moral standards and of horrific sexual offenses" which are "all too often packed" into national newspapers. And a bighorn-sheep biologist confessed in his memoir, "I still cringe at the memory of seeing old D-ram mount S-ram repeatedly." To think, he wrote, "of those magnificent beasts as 'queers'—oh, God!" "What Bagemihl's book really did," the Canadian primatologist and evolutionary psychologist Paul Vasey says, "is raise people's awareness around the fact that this occurs in quote-unquote nature—in animals. And that it can be studied in a serious, scholarly way." But studying it seriously means resolving a conundrum. At the heart of evolutionary biology, since Darwin, has been the idea that any genetic traits and behaviors that outfit an animal with an advantage—that help the animal make lots of offspring—will remain in a species, while ones that don't will vanish. In short, evolution gradually optimizes every animal toward a single goal: passing on its genes. The Yale ornithologist Richard Prum told me: "Our field is a lot like economics: we have a core of theory, like free-market theory, where we have the invisible hand of the market creating order—all commodities attain exactly the price they're worth. Homosexuality is a tough case, because it appears to violate that central tenet, that all of sexual behavior is about reproduction. The question is, why would anyone invest in sexual behavior that isn't reproductive?"—much less a behavior that looks to be starkly counterproductive. Moreover, if animals carrying the genes associated with it are less likely to reproduce, how has that behavior managed to stick around?