The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011

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The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 Page 33

by Mary Roach


  Still, many people who contacted Featherstone were actually grateful—for the same baseless prospect. Some confessed struggling with feelings for members of the same sex and explained to him, very disarmingly, the anguish they'd been living with and the hope his fruit-fly study finally offered them. There were poignant phone calls from parents, concerned about their gay children. "I felt bad in a way," Featherstone told me. It was hard not to be moved, and he would try to explain the implications, or lack thereof, of his research politely. "But there's also this liberal, modern side of me that's like: 'Take it easy, lady. Let your son be your son.'"

  Not long ago, more than two years after the publication of the fruit-fly paper, a woman wrote to Featherstone about her college-aged daughter. The daughter couldn't shake an attraction to other girls but honestly felt she'd never be able to bring herself to accept it either. She was now contemplating suicide. "She feels that she is losing herself," the mother wrote, "that sweet, innocent light that is within her." Like many who reached out to Featherstone, the woman and her daughter seemed to take for granted that homosexuality was inborn—natural. Otherwise the situation wouldn't feel so torturously unfair. The mother begged Featherstone to rethink his unwillingness to turn his fruit-fly research into a treatment. "We all deserve a choice," she wrote.

  Grasping for parallels with animals can create emotional truths, though it usually results in slushy logic. It's naive to slap conclusions about a given species directly onto humans.

  But it's disingenuous to ignore the possibility of any connection. "A lot of zoologists are suspicious, I think, of applying the same evolutionary principles to humans that they apply to animals," Paul Vasey, the Japanese-macaque researcher, told me. There's an understandable tendency among some scientists to play down those links to stave off ideological misreading and controversy. "But broadly speaking, research on animals can inform research on humans," Vasey says. What we learn about one species can expand or reorient our approach to others; a well-supported findi ng about one animal's behavior can generate new hypotheses worth testing in another. "My research on Japanese macaques might influence how someone conducts their research on octopus or their research on moose. Or their research on humans," he said. In fact, it has influenced Vasey's own research on humans.

  Since 2003, in addition to his investigation of female-female macaque sex, Vasey has also been studying a particular group of men in Samoa. "Westerners would consider them the equivalent of gay guys, I guess," he told me—they're attracted exclusively to other men. But they're not considered gay in Samoa. Instead, these men make up a third gender in Samoan culture, not men or women, called fa'afafine. (Vasey warned me that mislabeling the fa'afafine "gay" or "homosexual" in this article would jeopardize his ability to work with them in the future: while there's no stigma attached to being fa'afafine in Samoan culture, homosexuality is seen as different and often repugnant, even by some fa'afafine.)

  In a paper published earlier this year, Vasey and one of his graduate students at the University of Lethbridge, Doug P. VanderLaan, report that fa'afafine are markedly more willing to help raise their nieces and nephews than typical Samoan uncles: they're more willing to baby-sit, help pay school and medical expenses, and so on. Furthermore, this heightened altruism and affection is focused only on the fa'afafine's nieces and nephews. They don't just love kids in general. They are a kind of superuncle. This offers support for a hypothesis that has been toyed around with speculatively since the 1970s, when E. O. Wilson raised it: if a key perspective of evolutionary biology urges us to understand homosexuality in any species as a beneficial adaptation—if the point of life is to pass on one's genes—then maybe the role of gay individuals is to somehow help their family members generate more offspring. Those family members will, after all, share a lot of the same genes.

  Vasey and VanderLaan have also shown that mothers of fa'afafine have more kids than other Samoan women. And this fact supports a separate, existing hypothesis: maybe there's a collection of genes that, when expressed in a male, make him gay, but when expressed in a woman, make her more fertile. Like Wilson's theory, this idea was also meant to explain how homosexuality is maintained in a species and not pushed out by the invisible hand of Darwinian evolution. But unlike Wilson's hypothesis, it doesn't try to find a sneaky way to explain homosexuality as an evolutionary adaptation; instead, it imagines homosexuality as a byproduct of an adaptation. It's not too different from how Vasey explains why his female macaques insistently mount one another.

  "What we're finding in Samoa now," Vasey told me, "is that it's not an either-or." Neither of the two hypotheses on its own can neatly explain the existence, or evolutionary contribution, of fa'afafine. "But when you put the two together," he said, "the situation becomes a whole lot more nuanced." It's significant that Vasey began his work in Samoa only after he'd gotten to the crux of the macaque situation. "The Japanese macaques," he told me, "in terms of my personal development, they raised my awareness of the possibility that homosexual behavior might not be an adaptation. I was more likely to put the two hypotheses together because I was just more sensitive, I guess, to the reality that the world ... is organized so that adaptations and byproducts of adaptations coexist and hinge and impinge on each other. Humans are just another species."

  Vasey and VanderLaan's work in Samoa doesn't come close to settling theoretical questions about homosexuality. But unlike many biologists I spoke to, Vasey still seemed at ease discussing the speculative and even philosophical ties between animal and human sexuality. He's not concerned with how foolishly or maliciously his work might be misread. "If somebody wanted to make something out of it, they could," Vasey told me, "but they'd just look like some kind of misinformed hillbilly."

  Thus far, interpretations of his latest paper on the fa'afafine have been wildly contradictory but all equally overconfident. "New Gay Study Will Make Anti-Gay Activists Cry Uncle," one blog headline read. Another claimed, "Darwinian Fundamentalists Desperate to Rationalize Homosexuality," and cleared the way for a commenter to somehow bemoan Vasey's findings as "justification" for gay men "to sexually abuse their nephews."

  "There's two mating right there," Lindsay Young called out.

  They were right below her, ten yards away on a flat, vegetated ridge. It was late afternoon. One albatross lay on its stomach, wobbling with its wings pulled back—the way penguins slide over ice—while a second stood upright behind it, fat rippling down its telescoping neck, as it pumped its pelvis. "That looks pretty standard," Young said.

  The birds carried on for a while. Then the male shivered and retracted. The female came to her feet and walked off. Young read the female's leg band with her binoculars. "You just hit the jackpot," she told me. The bird was part of a female-female pair. The male had another mate.

  Young started scribbling notes, and we sat there rapidly rehashing the details. The sex didn't seem forced at all. In a rape, Young said—which, for all the talk of albatross monogamy, is not uncommon in the species—a male will pin a female's neck to the ground, or back her into a bush to tangle her up. (One study observed four different gangs of males forcing themselves on a single female, which lost an eye in the process.) But these two birds hardly seemed in a rush. Young made more notes. Then, with the male bird frozen right where he'd been left, the female slapped her rubbery feet on the ground, caught an updraft, and disappeared over the ocean.

  The next morning Young still seemed to be assuring herself that her interpretation of what we'd seen was reasonable. "We didn't see how it started, but how it ended looked..."—she searched for a precise, nonanthropomorphic phrase. She couldn't really find one, and let out a self-effacing laugh. "Mutually beneficial?" she said. "I don't know!"

  Dave Leonard, a friend of Young's, was tagging along. Leonard—tall, lanky, and tan, with a ponytail and a few days of scruff—is an ornithologist but works a deskjob now for a state wildlife agency and seemed to be enjoying a morning outside. He brandished a gigantic telephoto len
s in all directions and had trouble recovering after realizing he'd forgotten to pack his binoculars. Leonard knows his birds, but he was here as a bird lover, not a bird researcher, and wasn't overly concerned with scientific detachment. When Young pointed out a male albatross whinnying at every female that passed overhead, Leonard shook his head and joked, "I feel your pain, dude."

  Eventually Young spotted a female from one of the female-female pairs calling to a male about fifteen feet away. The female was standing right where the male and his partner usually build their nest. Her head was straight up in the air, and she clapped her beak animatedly. In Young's experience, it was rare for a bird to call so determinedly to another that's not her partner; this would definitely count as "solicitation," she said, if the two birds wound up copulating. "Pull up a rock," she told me and Leonard.

  We sat on the ground expectantly for a while. Eventually the male albatross took a few steps toward the calling female. Then it stopped and looked around. It was comical, given the circumstances.

  "'Will anyone see me if I cheat?'" Young said. "I'm not sure if he's taking her up on it or just going, 'Why are you in my spot?'" She was doing the bird's interior monologue, narrating for one blameless, anthropomorphic moment.

  The male stopped again and tucked his beak into the feathers behind his neck. Then he turned around and retreated. The taut sexual anticipation—at least as felt by us three humans—seemed to let up. "Well, his partner should be very proud of the self-control," Young said. Then she said, "I know when to cut my losses," gathered up her backpack and clipboard full of hard-earned data, and trudged off to watch some other birds.

  More than 4,000 miles across the Pacific, at a place called Taiaroa Head in southeastern New Zealand, two female Royal albatrosses (a related species) were building their nest. Later that winter those two birds would become one of only a few known female-female pairs to successfully fledge a chick at Taiaroa Head in more than sixty years of continuous observation of the colony. (Two years before, the same two birds had engaged in a threesome, presiding over a single nest with the help of one male—just another "alternative mating strategy" albatrosses sometimes engage in, it turns out.)

  The tourism board of Dunedin, a gay-friendly region of New Zealand, held a publicity-grabbing contest to name the "lesbian albatross" couple's chick. For months, as the paired females incubated their egg, a press officer at Tourism Dunedin issued releases, and news organizations around the world, from England to India, ran with the story. The PR woman also tried to interest me in a story about a flightless kakapo bird in the region named Sirocco who'd recently made a memorable appearance on the BBC—"He actually started to shag the presenter, Mark Carwardine!" she wrote to me—and "has avid followers on Facebook and Twitter!"

  A biologist working with the albatrosses at Taiaroa Head, Lyndon Perriman, seemed to bristle at the idea of naming any albatrosses—"They are wild birds," he wrote to me in an e-mail message. He noted that the female-female pair made for an inconvenient tourist attraction because their nest was not visible from any of the public viewing areas. It seemed fitting: people's ideas about the couple were riveting enough; it wasn't necessary to see the actual birds. The chick hatched on February 1. Tourism Dunedin named it Lola. The shortlist also included Rainbow, Lady Gagabatross, and Ellen.

  Could Time End?

  George Musser

  FROM Scientific American

  IN OUR EXPERIENCE, nothing ever really ends. When we die, our bodies decay and the material in them returns to the earth and the air, allowing for the creation of new life. We live on in what comes after. But will that always be the case? Might there come a point sometime in the future when there is no "after"? Depressingly, modern physics suggests the answer is yes. Time itself could end. All activity would cease, and there would be no renewal or recovery. The end of time would be the end of endings.

  This grisly prospect was an unanticipated prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity, which provides our modern understanding of gravity. Before that theory, most physicists and philosophers thought time was a universal drumbeat, a steady rhythm that the cosmos marches to, never varying, wavering, or stopping. Einstein showed that the universe is more like a big polyrhythmic jam session. Time can slow down, or stretch out, or let it rip. When we feel the force of gravity, we are feeling time's rhythmic improvisation; falling objects are drawn to places where time passes more slowly. Time not only affects what matter does but also responds to what matter is doing, like drummers and dancers firing one another up into a rhythmic frenzy. When things get out of hand, though, time can go up in smoke like an overexcited drummer who spontaneously combusts.

  The moments when that happens are known as singularities. The term actually refers to any boundary of time, be it beginning or end. The best known is the big bang, the instant 13.7 billion years ago when our universe—and, with it, time—burst into existence and began expanding. If the universe ever stops expanding and starts contracting again, it will go into something like the big bang in reverse—the big crunch—and bring time crashing to a halt.

  Time needn't perish everywhere. Relativity says it expires inside black holes while carrying on in the universe at large. Black holes have a well-deserved reputation for destructiveness, but they are even worse than you might think. If you fell into one, you would not only be torn to shreds, but your remains would eventually hit a singularity at the center of the hole, and your timeline would end. No new life would emerge from your ashes; your molecules would not get recycled. Like a character reaching the last page of a novel, you would not suffer mere death but existential apocalypse.

  It took physicists decades to accept that relativity theory would predict something so unsettling as death without rebirth. To this day they aren't quite sure what to make of it. Singularities are arguably the leading reason that physicists seek to create a unified theory of physics, which would merge Einstein's brainchild with quantum mechanics to create a quantum theory of gravity. They do so partly in the hope that they might explain singularities away. But you need to be careful what you wish for. Time's end is hard to imagine, but time's not ending may be equally paradoxical.

  Edges of Time

  Well before Albert Einstein came along, philosophers through the ages had debated whether time could be mortal. Immanuel Kant considered the issue to be an "antinomy"—something you could argue both ways, leaving you not knowing what to think.

  My father-in-law found himself on one horn of this dilemma when he showed up at an airport one evening only to find that his flight had long since departed. The people at the check-in counter chided him, saying he should have known that the scheduled departure time of "twelve A.M." meant the first thing in the morning. Yet my father-in-law's confusion was understandable. Officially there is no such time as "twelve A.M." Midnight is neither ante meridiem nor post meridiem. It is both the end of one day and start of the next. In twenty-four-hour time notation, it is both 2400 and 0000.

  Aristotle appealed to a similar principle when he argued that time can have neither beginning nor end. Every moment is both the end of an era and the start of something new; every event is both the outcome of something and the cause of something else. So how could time possibly end? What would prevent the last event in history from leading to another? Indeed, how would you even define the end of time when the very concept of "end" presupposes time? "It is not logically possible for time to have an end," asserts the University of Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne. But if time cannot end, then the universe must be infinitely long-lived, and all the riddles posed by the notion of infinity come rushing in. Philosophers have thought it absurd that infinity could be anything but a mathematical idealization.

  The triumph of the big bang theory and the discovery of black holes seemed to settle the question. The universe is shot through with singularities and could suffer a distressing variety of temporal cataclysms; even if it evades the big crunch, it might get done in by the big rip, the big freez
e, or the big brake. But then ask what singularities (big or otherwise) actually are, and the answer is no longer so clear. "The physics of singularities is up for grabs," says Lawrence Sklar of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, a leading philosopher of physics.

  The very theory that begat these monsters suggests they cannot really exist. At the big bang singularity, for example, relativity theory says that the precursors of every single galaxy we see were squashed into a single mathematical point—not just a tiny pinprick but a true point of zero size. Likewise, in a black hole, every single particle of a hapless astronaut gets compacted into an infinitesimal point. In both cases, calculating the density means dividing by zero volume, yielding infinity. Other types of singularities do not involve infinite density but an infinite something else.

  Although modern physicists do not feel quite the same aversion to infinity that Aristotle and Kant did, they still take it as a sign they have pushed a theory too far. For example, consider the standard theory of ray optics taught in middle school. It beautifully explains eyeglass prescriptions and funhouse mirrors. But it also predicts that a lens focuses light from a distant source to a single mathematical point, producing a spot of infinite intensity. In reality, light gets focused not to a point but to a bull's-eye pattern. Its intensity may be high but is always finite. Ray optics errs because light is not really a ray but a wave.

 

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