Climbing the Cat's Tree

The "kitty kat" is, by far, one of my son's favorite animals. But whence come our fluffy, fickle friends (evolutionarily, that is)? And their larger, less cuddly cousins like the puma or lion, for that matter?

A team of researchers at the National Cancer Institute may have put the question to rest (or at least given it a cat nap). After analyzing DNA from all 37 living cat species, the team has constructed a family tree for the family Felidae, rooted in a single species living in Asia 11 million years ago. From there, the cats spread across the world in at least 10 intercontinental migrations, with changes in sea level giving evolution a nudge. (See the original abstract in the journal Science.)

Building the cat family tree has been a perplexing problem, as dated cat fossils are few and far between and many of the modern cat species diverged very recently. The research team got around these issues by using information from the sex (X and Y) chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA (often used for calibrating evolutionary clocks) to measure how related different species of cat are and when the different branches on the evolutionary tree split off from each other.

So where does this put the "kitty kat?" The household cat is the youngest member of the family, emerging 6.2 to 6.7 million years ago, with domestication probably occurring within the last several thousand years (the oldest known pet cat was found two years ago in a 9,500 year-old burial site in Cyprus). The team plans to next investigate the time and location of the cat's domestication.

Additional links:
New Scientist
Nat'l Geographic

Would you like some cheese with that w(h)ine?

Perhaps cheese and wine don't go so well together. New Scientist recently reported on a study suggesting that cheese suppresses the flavors and aromas in wine...all of them, in fact, except for buttery aroma, which itself is a component of cheese. The study authors, who recruited trained wine tasters as test subjects (and presumably threw a big ol' wine and cheese party; I wonder where they get their funding?), hypothesize that cheese proteins may bind the flavor molecules in the wine, or that the fat in the cheese may coat the mouth. Whatever the answer, my wife has her own opinon on the matter: "Science be damned, I'll trust my tastebuds."

An interesting factoid

Carolus Linnaeus, the 18th century Swede who - building on the work of John Ray and his concept of the "species" - gave us the beginnings of our modern system of biological classificaion, got his start studying the sexual organs of plants. His classification scheme was founded in comparative studies of the size, shape, and numbers of pistils and stamens in flowering plants. According to Daniel Boorstein's The Discoverers, Linnaeus was one of the more controversial researchers in the modest times of the mid-1700s, something of a Freud for the botanical world. (I think of him as more of a Kinsey.)

We don't need another hero...do we?

In a recent New York Times article (1/1/06) , John Horgan opened up the middle-aged (if not old) question, "Will there be another Einstein?" The question itself was natural, given that previous day had marked the end of the 100th anniversary of Einstein's miracle year and the World Year of Physics 2005. Horgan points to one answer put forth by author and biographer James Glieck - "there are so many brilliant physicists alive today that it has become harder for any individual to stand apart...our perception of Einstein as a towering figure is, well, relative." But overall, Horgan believes, Einstein was a product of "time and temperament," the like of which won't be seen again.

This is not to say that science has, of late, lacked its towering figures. Horgan limited his musings to the world of physics - one which, his own sources admit, is becoming ever more esoteric. (I like to think of myself as being mildly intelligent, but when I try to read the physics articles in Scientific American, I get lost after the 2nd or 3rd paragraph.) James Watson and Francis Crick, Stephan Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, and Richard Feynmann are the names that immediately come by mind as some of the towers of late 20th/early 21st century science. We recently have seen the downfall of another such figure: Hwang Woo-suk, who, while not idolized in the West, had achieved almost rock-star status in the Far East.

I think Horgan asked the wrong question. I would ask, Do we need another Einstein, another scientist of such fame and moral regard? Given the struggles of American scientific education, a role model for budding young scientists, one who can get them jazzed up about science is certainly needed. Horgan, I think, points out one of the main problems: "[It] may be that science as a whole has lost its moral sheen. We are more aware than ever of the downside of scientific advances...." But not only this, we are more apt to point out the downsides before the good sides. We lost trust in our politicians and governmental institutions following the Vietnam War; that mistrust has bled over to many aspects of our culture, including our perceptions of science (particularly federally funded science). Thus the proponents of creationism and intelligent design are given greater voice.

I would like to raise another point...that scientists have forgotten how to talk to people. Einstein, Dawkins, Gould - each of them has/had a gift for communicating what they do so that the educated layperson could get it. Perhaps this was always a rare gift, but it seems be ever rarer, particularly as science has become ever more specialized and subspecialized. I had a professor in public health school, Dr. Schiff, whose understood this problem keenly, though he expressed it in a limited way. During graduate student seminars, he would occasionally ask what I called the Schiff Question: "You are at a school of public health. What does your research have to do with public health?" Nine times out of 10, the student would look up from their presentation on malaria genetics or viral replication, dumbfounded. They couldn't answer because they couldn't see or express the larger context of what they were doing. I find this to be disturbingly common in the biomedical world; I can only imagine what things are like in physics or chemistry!

But I digress. Do we need another Einstein? Perhaps. We need a figure (or figures) who can help bring trust back to the people who pay for the majority of experiments, who can speak with a moral voice on the good and bad of how scientific knowledge is applied. (And I remind you, scientific knowledge - data - in and of itself is amoral and agnostic...it's the means by which it is obtained, the spirit in which it is sought, and the manner in which it is applied that need to be examined.)

But we need more than that...we need an education system that prepares people to understand at least the basis of science, to understand how science integrates with their lives. The Register recently ran an item on a poll that asked what people think Jesus would have on his iPod. I tell you, if people could channel that energy into thinking about how the samples returned by the Stardust spacecraft are directly related to us (we are, after all, made from the same stuff as the rest of the solar system), we'd already have a much friendlier climate for science in this country.

And we need a training system that reminds scientists that they have to be able to tell people about what they do if they ever want to regain the trust they have lost.