Thanksgiving and the Myth of Native American "Savages"

Prominent scientists exaggerate the violence of Native Americans, whom European invaders ravaged.

By John Horgan on November 21, 2016  SCIENTIFIC AMERICA

Native Americans, accused of Hobbesian savagery by modern scientists, treated Europeans kindly in early encounters. This painting shows the legendary Thanksgiving feast between Pilgrims and the Wampanoag, who helped the newcomers survive and were eventually driven from their land.  Credit: Jean Leon Gerome Ferris 1863-1930, U.S. Library of Congress

Note: This post first appeared on November 21, 2016. It's still relevant, of course.

The approach of Thanksgiving, that quintessential American holiday, has me brooding once again over scientists’ slanderous portrayals of Native Americans as bellicose brutes.

When I was in grade school, my classmates and I wore paper Indian headdresses and Pilgrim hats and reenacted the “first Thanksgiving,” in which supposedly friendly Native Americans joined Pilgrims for a fall feast of turkey, venison, squash and corn. This episode seemed to support the view—often (apparently erroneously) attributed to the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau—of Native Americans and other pre-state people as peaceful, “noble savages.”

Prominent scientists now deride depictions of pre-state people as peaceful. “Contra leftist anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage,” psychologist Steven Pinker wrote in 2007, “quantitative body counts—such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with ax marks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men—suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own.” According to Pinker, the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes “got it right” when he called pre-state life a “war of all against all.”

Pinker expanded on this claim in his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature. The Hobbesian thesis has been advanced in other influential books, notably War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, by anthropologist Lawrence Keeley; Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage, by archaeologist Steven LeBlanc; War in Human Civilization, by political scientist Azar Gat; The Social Conquest of Earth, by biologist Edward Wilson; and The World Until Yesterday, by geographer Jared Diamond.

Referring specifically to the pre-Colombian New World, Keeley asserted, “The dogs of war were seldom on a leash.” Popular culture has amplified these scientific claims. In the 2007 HBO docudrama Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Chief Sitting Bull complains to a U.S. Army colonel about whites’ violent treatment of the Indians. The colonel retorts, “You were killing each other for hundreds of moons before the first white stepped foot on this continent.”

Yes, Native Americans waged war before Europeans showed up. The evidence is especially strong in the American Southwest, where archaeologists have found numerous skeletons with projectile points embedded in them and other marks of violence; war seems to have surged during periods of drought. But as I have asserted in my book The End of War and on this site, Pinker and other Hobbesians have exaggerated warfare among early humans. These scientists have replaced the myth of the noble savage with the myth of the savage savage.

In two momentous early encounters, Native Americans greeted Europeans with kindness. Here is how Christopher Columbus described the Arawak, tribal people living in the Bahamas when he landed there in 1492: “They…brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned…. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance…. With 50 men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

How that passage—which I found in historian Howard Zinn's 1980 classic A People’s History of the United States—captures the whole sordid history of colonialism! Columbus was as good as his word. Within decades the Spaniards had slaughtered almost all the Arawaks and other natives of the New Indies and enslaved the few survivors. “The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide,” wrote the historian Samuel Morison (who admired Columbus).

A similar pattern unfolded in New England in the early 17th century. After the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth in 1620 on the Mayflower, they almost starved to death. Members of a local tribe, the Wampanoag, helped the newcomers, showing them how to plant corn and other local foods. In the fall of 1621 the Pilgrims celebrated their first successful harvest with a three-day feast with the Wampanoag. The event my classmates and I reenacted in grade school really happened!

The friendliness of the Wampanoag was extraordinary, because they had recently been ravaged by diseases caught from previous European explorers. Europeans had also killed, kidnapped and enslaved Native Americans in the region. The Plymouth settlers, during their desperate first year, had even stolen grain and other goods from the Wampanoag, according to Wikipedia’s entry on Plymouth Colony.

The good vibes of that 1621 feast soon dissipated. As more English settlers arrived in New England, they seized more and more land from the Wampanoag and other tribes, who eventually resisted with violence—in vain. We all know how this story ended. “The Indian population of 10 million that lived north of Mexico when Columbus came would ultimately be reduced to less than a million,” Zinn wrote.

In “Indians, Slaves, and Mass Murder: The Hidden History,” a recent essay in The New York Review of Books, anthropologist Peter Nabokov notes that colonizers reduced California’s native population from 350,000 at first contact to under 17,000 by 1900. State laws allowed and even encouraged the slaughter of Native Americans. “Extermination,” Nabokov comments, was “considered no great tragedy for an entire people who were uniformly and irredeemably defined as savage and inhuman.”

Centuries earlier, the Arawak and Wampanoag were kind to us—and by us I mean white people of European descent. We showed our thanks by sickening, subjugating and slaughtering them and other indigenous people. And we have the gall to call them more savage than us.

Please ponder this dark irony as you celebrate Thanksgiving.

Addendum: U.S. government maltreatment of Native Americans continues. A United Nations human-rights official accuses “law enforcement officials, private security firms and the North Dakota National Guard” of using “excessive force” against Native Americans and others protesting an oil pipeline that “runs through land sacred to indigenous people.”

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

*Self-plagiarism alert: This is an updated version of a column posted on previous Thanksgivings.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology. His books include The End of Science, The End of War and Mind-Body Problems, available for free at mindbodyproblems.com. For many years, he wrote the immensely popular blog Cross Check for Scientific American.

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Quitting the hominid fight club: The evidence is flimsy for innate chimpanzee–let alone human–warfare.

New Study of Foragers Undermines Claim That War Has Deep Evolutionary Roots.

New Study of Prehistoric Skeletons Undermines Claim that War Has Deep Evolutionary Roots.

Survey of Earliest Human Settlements Undermines Claim That War Has Deep Evolutionary Roots.

Chimp Violence Fails to Support Deep-Roots Theory of War.

Margaret Mead’s War Theory Kicks Butt of Neo-Darwinian and Malthusian Models.

RIP Military Historian John Keegan, Who Saw War As Product of Culture Rather than Biology.

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Scientists Are Becoming More Politically Engaged

Here’s what that means beyond the 2020 elections

By Fernando Tormos-Aponte, Scott Frickel, John Parker on November 25, 2020

BEHAVIOR & SOCIETY | OPINION

Credit: Getty Images


For many, the 2016 presidential election represented an existential threat to science and jolted large segments of the research workforce into street protest mode. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has thrust scientists into global prominence, while the Black Lives Matter uprising has forced a reckoning with science’s problematic past and present. In many ways, science itself was on the ballot this Election Day. Prominent scientific journals endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, scientific societies issued statements in the wake of the George Floyd killing, and thousands of scientists went on strike in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.


With scientists and scientific organizations now more politically engaged than at any time since the Vietnam War, we sought to understand the scope and focus of their political engagement. Before the November 3 elections, we surveyed more than 1,500 researchers belonging to the Union of Concerned Scientists Science Network (UCSSN)—a multidisciplinary network of more than 19,000 politically engaged scientists, medical doctors, and engineers. What we learned may have important implications beyond the current electoral season. Scientists are becoming an important mobilizing force at a time that urgently calls for their political involvement.

SCIENTISTS ARE PART OF THE BLUE WAVE

UCSSN scientists vote. Of those we surveyed, nearly everyone who was eligible to vote cast ballots in the 2016 presidential election (93 percent) and the 2018 midterms (92 percent). For comparison, just 53 percent of the voting-age population in the United States voted in the last midterm election, itself a historic high.

And they are consensus Democratic voters. Eighty-nine percent of survey respondents voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016; only 1 percent voted for Trump.

Not surprisingly, their view of the president has not improved with time. UCSSN scientists rate the administration’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic very poorly, take issue with the way the administration uses science to handle the pandemic, and identify White House attacks on science generally as a serious social threat. To be sure, our respondents are highly politically mobilized and skew left ideologically; in comparison, the scientific community is more ideologically diverse, and traditionally avoids political advocacy. Nevertheless, our results suggest that a scientific blue wave was likely a factor in the election.

To be clear, scientists represent just under 5 percent of the U.S. workforce and tend to concentrate in coastal cities and regions that are already overwhelmingly blue. In this respect, scientists do not represent the kind of strategic voting bloc we find in labor, evangelical, or Latinx voters.

Yet scientists have significant emotional grievances against the Trump administration. Scientists have been disrespected, their work stifled, their data hidden or destroyed, and consensus around basic scientific ideas challenged. These grievances fueled their involvement in electoral politics, organizing, and advocacy, among other forms of political engagement.

ACTIVISM BEYOND THE BALLOT BOX

Voting is just the tip of the iceberg for UCSSN scientists, who tell us they are actively engaged in a range of political activities related to national politics. Nine out of 10 respondents engaged in at least one form of political activity in the past twelve months. Even more striking, 99 percent report engaging at least two types of science-related activism, and 83 percent report engaging in at least four. These scientists are also much more likely to have engaged in protest activities during the past 12 months than the average U.S. voter. What have they been doing?

Most UCSSN scientists have contacted an elected official (84 percent) and would like more guidance on how to engage with them, the general public and their communities. Elected officials can expect to get calls, e-mails, petitions and letters from scientists. Respondents also reported being very active on social media and protesting in the streets. Half of UCSSN respondents attended one or more demonstrations – nearly four times the national average (14 percent). Most signed a petition (94 percent) and donated to a non-profit organization (79 percent). Some have even started new organizations (7 percent).

Engaged in multiple types of political action, these scientists are far more committed to engaging politically than the average U.S. voter. These findings run counter to the perception of scientists as being “above” politics. And although this is a small population, as a group, scientists are exceptionally well connected to various kinds of organizations, including universities, think tanks, civil society groups, social movement organizations and—not least—scientific societies. Even self-described “non-political” scientific societies are mobilizing their members. Three fourths of scientists in our survey report receiving support from their employers for science-related advocacy. Less than 10 percent reported that their careers were affected negatively as a result of engaging in science advocacy, a finding that flies in the face of common wisdom suggesting that advocacy risks career suicide.

MOBILIZING SCIENTISTS BEYOND 2020
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The unprecedented high-profile endorsements of Joe Biden from prestigious academic journals signaled to rank-and-file scientists that political advocacy is no longer anathema to scientific research, but should be embraced as a central aspect of science’s social mission. An ongoing chorus of calls to defend science in the context of climate change, attacks on health care, and environmental justice, among other pressing issues only reinforce and legitimate this message.

Beyond the election, scientists and their organizations should focus on building mobilization capacity among the various the groups that they are connected to. These include scientists’ own professional communities, as well as students and staff on college campuses, members of the science and engineering workforce, and the more than 24 million workers employed in education and health services.

The Trump administration’s sidelining of science drove scientists to the streets. The real work of organizing the political capital of scientists will continue. Now that the yard signs are coming down, we must be prepared to engage with what remains and advance the political struggle in defense of science.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Fernando Tormos-Aponte

Fernando Tormos-Aponte is an assistant professor of public policy and political science at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, a Kendall Fellow at the Union of Concerned Scientists, and a visiting sscholar at the Johns Hopkins University Department of Political Science. His research focuses on how social movements cope with internal divisions and gain political influence.

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Scott Frickel

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John Parker

John N. Parker is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Oslo. He is an expert in the sociology of science, creativity, and emotions. His work has been published in journals such as American Sociological Review, Social Psychology Quarterly and Social Studies of Science.

EDITORIAL
25 NOVEMBER 2020

UNESCO must reform to stay relevant — and reconnect people through science
At 75, the UN agency with a focus on science cooperation is fighting for its future role.


Member states should back reforms proposed by Audrey Azoulay, UNESCO’s director-general since 2017.Credit: Chesnot/Getty

UNESCO was born on 16 November 1945, just a few weeks after the end of the Second World War. Its founders had been persuaded that science — along with culture and education — could help to cement peace between countries, protect human rights and improve living standards. Now, as the United Nations and UNESCO turn 75, the Paris-based agency is struggling to determine its future.

There’s a lot to show for those 75 years. Today, UNESCO operates the system that has awarded World Heritage status to more than 1,100 important historical sites; the agency has also established a global network of more than 700 biosphere reserves. It holds nations to account on their commitments to get every child into school, and monitors threats to journalists around the world.

But among the UN’s family of specialized agencies, UNESCO has never been properly funded — and it has been trying to recover from a funding crisis for the past decade. Data supplied by UNESCO show that the agency spent US$1.1 billion in the 2-year period from 2010 to 2011, but in 2012–13, spending was down by 16% after the Palestinian Authority was granted full membership and the United States and Israel stopped their financial contributions in protest. Although its spending was back to $1.1 billion by 2018–19, inflation has greatly reduced its spending power. UNESCO is now in the middle of a transformation designed, in part, to enable it to live within its means.

When Nature spoke to UNESCO’s current and former staff, as well as to researchers who study and collaborate with it, we found immense affection for the organization and respect for its past achievements. However, there was also a sense of frustration over its future. UNESCO needs to put these concerns to rest once and for all.
Pulling together

UNESCO’s history is a stellar example of science’s power to advance both knowledge and diplomacy. In the wake of two world wars, and especially during the cold war, the agency helped to unlock the doors to international scientific cooperation, particularly in the physical sciences.

In 1951, it hosted the meeting that led to the creation of CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory. Since then, CERN has mushroomed from a project intended to reunite and stimulate Europe’s physicists to a place where scientists from all over the world can collaborate. It has spawned a number of technological spin-offs and has maintained its commitment to global knowledge-sharing.

Paris 1951: the Birth of CERN

When nations were reluctant to share their oceans data, UNESCO hosted the first meeting of the International Oceanographic Commission in 1961. The commission still has a role in international efforts to sustainably manage ocean resources. And UNESCO’s efforts to connect scientists from countries with difficult relationships continued with SESAME, the Middle East’s first synchrotron light source. That project was launched in 1999 and provides an essential tool to researchers in a range of fields, from medicine to materials science. Getting scientists from Iran and Israel, or Cyprus and Turkey — all SESAME member countries — to work together is no small achievement.

That same year, UNESCO co-organized the World Conference on Science in Budapest. One of the outcomes was the creation of SciDev.Net, one of the first open-access platforms for sharing the results of scientific research, on which Science and Nature worked together to share some of their content with low- and middle-income countries.

And all of this happened in an organization that might never have had an ‘S’ in its title. UNESCO was originally conceived to protect and promote education and culture. It made room for science after leading scientists andscience media (including Nature) helped to persuade the UN’s founding nations that their vision of a world at peace could not be a world without science.


UNESCO’s troubled drive for peace through science and culture

And yet, for all its external successes, UNESCO has faced difficulties in how it is treated by some of its larger member states. That, in turn, has affected the ability of its staff to get things done. It hasn’t helped that some countries have treated their membership of UNESCO like a revolving door, joining and leaving as they wish, with little regard for the consequences for the agency’s work when their funding stops. The United States has left twice, and the United Kingdom and Singapore have also withdrawn in the past, then returned some years later.

When richer countries stop paying, projects on the ground suffer, but so does trust in those nations’ commitment to UNESCO’s goals. It means officials at UNESCO’s headquarters are forced to spend time and energy raising funds from other sources, and reorganizing staff and management structures to fit changing priorities — and end up spreading themselves too thinly. Time spent fire-fighting is time taken away from other priorities.

In 2013, UNESCO’s leadership responded to its loss of income with a proposal that would probably have led to most of its work in its communication and information sector being abolished. But this was seen as a step too far and rejected by member states. Now, the director-general Audrey Azoulay is trying a different approach — intended, in part, to take some of the political heat out of UNESCO’s work by focusing on things more countries can agree on, and playing to the agency’s strengths as cultural guardian, ethical compass and laboratory of ideas.

Azoulay and her team have initiated a “strategic transformation” to spearhead internal reform and programme change — the latter requiring approval by member states late next year. Meanwhile, she is prioritizing five areas: rebuilding and reviving the devastated Iraqi city of Mosul; promoting open science; working on much-needed common standards on the ethics of artificial intelligence; a long-term vision for education; and biodiversity. The last of these is a belated, but much-needed recognition of UNESCO’s long-standing experience in the study of Indigenous and local knowledge across research fields. Its importance is bolstered by the results of a UNESCO survey that asked 15,000 people what they saw as the biggest threats to peace — two-thirds of respondents said biodiversity and climate change were their greatest concern.

There’s also a strong argument for reviving UNESCO’s earlier science mission. In today’s fractured world, fundamental and applied science could once again be used to help bring people and societies together. In the Middle East, for example, UNESCO could help to reconnect scientists in Qatar with those in neighbouring countries. At present, researchers are unable to collaborate because of a regional dispute. The agency could have a greater role in South Asia’s science, which is affected by the strained relations between India and Pakistan. And UNESCO could do more for researchers in Europe, where fractures are developing between members of the European Union.

UNESCO should seek to reconnect people through science, as it has done before. But there can be no illusions about how hard the task will be. After 75 years, UNESCO is facing one of its toughest tests. Member states must make every effort to pull together with the agency’s headquarters and its field staff. UNESCO’s potential in a crisis-ridden world should not be underestimated. If UNESCO ceased to exist, the world would need to recreate it.

Nature 587, 521-522 (2020)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03311-3

Published: 10 November 1945

Science and the United Nations
JULIAN HUXLEY

Nature volume 156, pages553–556(1945)Cite this article


Abstract

THE proposals for the new United Nations Educational and Cultural Organisation were first put forward by the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education, which has sat in London since 1941, and in some of its later work was assisted by a delegation from the United Nations. This body was originally concerned with the immediate and essentially short-term task of securing the educational and cultural reconstruction of those parts of Europe and Asia which had suffered cultural distortion or destruction at the hands of the Axis Powers; and in April 1944 it formulated proposals designed to meet these needs. At San Francisco, however, this aim was extended and generalized, and it was proposed that a permanent special agency of the United Nations, devoted to educational and cultural tasks, should be established. The present Conference is engaged on the problems of giving final form to the draft charter of the Organisation put forward by the Allied Education Ministers, and broadly outlining its main aims and functions and of delimiting its field of action; after which it will set up an interim commission to work out details and to prepare the ground for the first full Conference to be held about a year hence.

To lead in space, America must lead in space collaboration

SPACE RACE 2.0 CAPITALI$M IN SPACE

The new era of space competition is far more complex, but government agencies have yet to coalesce around a common campaign plan, a leading government adviser argues
Astronaut Rick Mastracchio participates in a mission on the International Space Station in 2007. | NASA via Getty Images


By STEVE ISAKOWITZ
11/25/2020 

Next year will mark 60 years since President John F. Kennedy announced the United States would send a man safely to the moon and back. A more ambitious objective — sustainable exploration and development of the moon, our solar system and beyond — currently faces America’s leaders, albeit within a more complex space landscape than the U.S.-Soviet space race.

Space is an increasingly crowded, democratized and contested environment. More than 60 countries now have space budgets, and more than 70 own or operate satellites in orbit. Myriad private organizations are launching satellites, including many smaller satellites that nevertheless have significant capabilities. Government agencies are vying for jurisdiction over space issues. Amid all this, Russia and China are investing in capabilities to threaten U.S. and international satellites.

The crowding of space reflects its enormous potential, but also necessitates action to ensure its sustainability. In the next presidential term, the U.S. will face high-level decisions on critical space policy issues with long-lasting implications. Through our role as a nonpartisan, nonprofit partner to the entire U.S. space enterprise, The Aerospace Corporation has published a comprehensive Space Agenda 2021 outlook for these issues. We work with all organizations involved in space to solve their hardest technical and strategic problems. Our success is measured by the degree to which the U.S. leads in delivering great accomplishments in the global space ecosystem.

Strategies that earned the U.S. space preeminence in the 20th century won’t keep us ahead in this century. We need new methods to achieve this. At a high level, we recommend an emphasis on stronger collaboration across the space enterprise to realize this potential and address those challenges.

Streamline government collaboration

As commercial space efforts expand and diversify, government must ensure safe and responsible behavior in space. Several federal agencies exert some space policy jurisdiction, but responsibility remains fuzzy on emerging regulatory issues, such as protecting our satellites, ensuring spaceflight safety, regulating emergent space business applications and preserving our world and worlds we explore in the future.

The U.S. should establish a national approach to space safety with clear lanes of authority and technically informed regulations. We must especially lead in developing space traffic management safety norms and standards for space operators to mitigate the growing risks of orbital debris.

To promote innovation, the U.S. government must also exchange traditionally siloed approaches for greater agency interdependence. The current National Space Strategy advocates a “whole-of-government” approach with agencies working to maximize resources under a shared mission. Translating this policy commitment into practical reality will give the U.S. government and private industry a real edge in fielding advanced space capabilities.

Strengthen defense space partnerships

Streamlined U.S. jurisdiction on space issues may strengthen defense space partnerships — a critical priority in the Pentagon’s Defense Space Strategy as Russia and China remain formidable threats. The U.S. and its close partners comprise 11 of the world’s 15 largest space budgets while operating two-thirds of all active, orbiting satellites. However, with multiple U.S. agencies working on defense space, some allies are expressing frustration that their space communities don’t have a clear path to collaborating or know with whom to engage, while information classification frequently stymies collaboration.

U.S. leaders should consider involving more, and new, partners in space exercises, lowering classification levels and improving information sharing with allies. Strengthening defense space partnerships will require higher tolerance for risk and deviations from traditional practices. It is encouraging that key U.S. defense leaders want to address these barriers.
Deepen private space partnerships

The U.S. government is no longer the sole driver for space innovation. It increasingly recognizes the advantages of relying on the private space sector while focusing its own attention on fostering a healthy market. The U.S. government should prioritize commercial capabilities and contracted services, even if key capabilities may remain government-owned and operated. Continued research and development will keep the U.S. at the forefront of space activities, promote domestic businesses and encourage new innovators to enter the market.

Private space activity also presents emerging issues for which rigid regulatory frameworks may be ineffective. Space investors and innovators seek a balance between regulatory flexibility to accommodate new ideas and reasonable levels of certainty that allow for longer-term investment planning and space sustainability. Striking this balance is a priority.
Preserve investment in space

Finally, leaders should recognize how frequent policy shifts can compromise major NASA and national security space missions, which take many years to deliver the game-changing projects that draw people to space and make a difference for the nation and the world. Major shifts should be made only with serious deliberation.

Partnerships between the federal government, the private sector and the international space community have delivered significant return on investment to the American public. This collaboration can take us to amazing places — in space and here on Earth. We must accelerate and gain momentum to maintain global leadership in space.

Steve Isakowitz is president and CEO of The Aerospace Corporation, which operates a federally funded research and development center for the U.S. space enterprise. He previously served as president of Virgin Galactic and as space programs branch chief at the White House Office of Management and Budget.

New discovery allows early detection of shade avoidance syndrome in plants

by Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology

Raman spectroscopy and the carotenoid Raman peak allows for early detection of Shade Avoidance Syndrome (SAS) in the (a) model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and (b) leafy vegetables Kai Lan and Choy Sum. Diagrams adapted from Sng et al., 2020. Plant Methods 16: 144. Credit: Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART)

Researchers from the Disruptive & Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision (DiSTAP) Interdisciplinary Research Group (IRG) of Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT's research enterprise in Singapore and Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory (TLL) have discovered a way to use Raman spectroscopy for early detection of shade avoidance syndrome (SAS) in plants. The discovery can help farmers with timely intervention against SAS, leading to better plant health and crop yield.

SAS is an adaptive response and an irreversible phenomenon, where plants reach for more light to overcome shaded conditions. It is commonly seen in plants experiencing vegetative shade, which is detrimental to plant health, as it leads to a number of issues including hindrance of leaf development, early flowering and weakening of the plant's structure and immune system.

Thus, early detection of SAS is key for sustainable agriculture and improved crop yield. However, existing methods for detection of SAS in plants are restricted to observing structural changes, making it difficult to detect SAS early.

In a paper titled "Rapid metabolite response in leaf blade and petiole as a marker for shade avoidance syndrome," published in Plant Methods, SMART DiSTAP and TLL scientists explain their new way of detecting SAS early on, allowing farmers to intervene in time to prevent the irreversible effects of SAS. The team built a tabletop Raman spectroscopy instrument that allows measurement of carotenoid levels in plants, which can indicate whether a plant has SAS.

"Our experiments with Raman spectroscopy detected a decrease in the carotenoid contents of plants that have SAS," said Dr. Gajendra Pratap Singh, co-first author of the paper and scientific director and principal investigator at DiSTAP. "While plants with longer exposure to shade developed more severe SAS, these morphological changes were only seen after one to three days. However, changes in the carotenoid peak intensities were detected much earlier, from just four hours of shade treatment."

Using Raman spectroscopy, the scientists could non-destructively measure carotenoid content in the plant leaves. They discovered its correlation to the severity of SAS and as a peak biomarker for early diagnosis. This cuts down the time taken to detect SAS from days to a matter of hours. The method can also be used to detect SAS in plants due to high-density planting and can be particularly useful to improve urban farming practices.

"We conducted our experiments on a number of edible plants, including frequently consumed Asian vegetables like Kai Lan and Choy Sum," said Benny Jian Rong Sng, the paper's co-first author and Ph.D. student from Dr. In-Cheol Jang's group at TLL and Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore. "Our results showed that Raman spectroscopy can be used to detect SAS induced by shade as well as high-density planting. Regardless of the food crop, this technology can be applied to improve agriculture and to meet the nutritional demands of today's growing populations."

Dr. In-Cheol Jang, Principal Investigator at TLL and DiSTAP, who led the project, said the novel discovery can go a long way in assisting farmers to improve urban farming practices. "We look forward to helping urban farmers achieve higher crop yields by detecting SAS within shorter time periods. By adopting scalable, precision agri-technologies like Raman spectroscopy-enabled sensors, we can better position cities like Singapore to grow more produce with less resources, while achieving desirable nutritional profiles for global food security."


Explore further

SMART discovers breakthrough way to look at the surface of nanoparticles, accelerating nano-engineering of materials
More information: Benny Jian Rong Sng et al, Rapid metabolite response in leaf blade and petiole as a marker for shade avoidance syndrome, Plant Methods (2020). DOI: 10.1186/s13007-020-00688-0
Provided by Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology

Fossils show 66 million years of insects eating kauri trees

by Cleveland Museum of Natural History

NOVEMBER 25, 2020

Agathis microstachya and Agathis robusta growing near Lake Barrine, Australia. 

Credit: Cleveland Museum of Natural History

Exquisitely preserved feeding marks on fossil conifer leaves show that the same insect feeding and fungi persisted for millions of years on the same type of plant, from ancient Patagonian rainforests to the modern rainforests of the tropical West Pacific.


Over 50 million years ago, rainforests teeming with life stretched across the ancient supercontinent Gondwana, including what is now South America, Antarctica and Australia. Based on fossil evidence, many plants that now live in places like Australia, New Guinea and Borneo are survivors from the Gondwanan rainforest. Fossil leaves from the Patagonian region of southern Argentina also preserve an astonishing variety of insect-feeding damage traces like those seen in modern rainforests, showing that the Gondwanan forests were also home to diverse plant-feeding insect communities. Did those ancient plant-insect communities survive the breakup of Gondwana and the dramatic range changes of the host plants, and are they still alive today?

An international group of researchers focused on fossils of Agathis, a majestic, tall conifer commonly known as kauri, comparing thousands of modern specimens from Australasia and Southeast Asia to 482 Patagonian fossils ranging in age from 66 to 48 million years, latest Cretaceous to middle Eocene. Their findings were published today (Nov. 25) in Communications Biology.

Leaf mine on a leaf of cf. Agathis from the latest Cretaceous Lefipán Formation, Chubut, Argentina. Similar blotch mines on Agathis from before and after the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction (when the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct) represent the first evidence of a probable surviving leaf mine association on the same plant genus during the mass extinction. Credit: Cleveland Museum of Natural History

"We found remarkably similar suites of insect and fungal damage on fossil and living Agathis leaves over a vast span of time and space," said Dr. Michael Donovan, Senior Collections Manager of Paleobotany & Paleoecology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and lead author of the paper.

Insects have evolved many different plant-feeding strategies, and hundreds of damage types have been recognized in the fossil record. On both the fossil and modern Agathis leaves, the team found highly specialized leaf mines that insect larvae create as they tunnel through leaves, tumor-like galls, bite marks along leaf edges from hungry insects, the waxy protective armor of scale insects, and rust fungi.

Notably, the researchers found extremely similar elongated, blotchy leaf mines on Agathis at all the fossil sites and on multiple living species of the same conifer.

Leaf mine, a tunnel made by a larval insect, on a leaf of Agathis zamunerae (a conifer in the family Araucariaceae) from Laguna del Hunco, an early Eocene fossil locality in Chubut, Argentina. Similar mines were found on fossil Agathis from the latest Cretaceous to middle Eocene in Patagonia and modern species in Australasia and Southeast Asia. 

Credit: Cleveland Museum of Natural History

"While working on a previous study on the recovery of insect feeding after the end-Cretaceous "dinosaur" extinction, I surveyed over 20,000 Patagonian and North American leaf fossils," said Dr. Donovan. "The leaf mines on Agathis are the only evidence I found for any type of leaf mine on the same host plant surviving the dinosaur extinction."


The separation of South America from Antarctica led to cooling and drying in Patagonia, and over millions of years, the high-diversity rainforest, including Agathis, disappeared from Patagonia, replaced by the grasslands and lower-diversity temperate rainforests of today. Agathis requires consistently rainy conditions to survive and must have tracked rainforest habitats throughout its history as the Earth's plates moved, leading to its current distribution in warm, wet areas from New Zealand to Malaysia.

The researchers said that the environmental tracking by Agathis as the southern continents moved into their current positions might have provided stable conditions that led to the establishment of long-term relationships between Agathis and the insects and fungi that depend on it, even as its range has shifted massively. The scientists said it is also possible that unrelated groups of insects fed upon Agathis in similar ways at different points in its history.

"I've walked in mountain rainforests of Australia and Borneo and seen exactly the same feeding patterns on living kauri trees as in 65-million-year-old fossils that we've collected in Argentina," said Dr. Peter Wilf, professor of geosciences at Penn State University and a participant in the study. "It's absolutely stunning, all the more so because these communities and the threatened biodiversity and evolutionary history they represent were never noticed before, and we're documenting them first from fossils."

Explore further Iconic Australasian trees found as fossils in South America

More information: Persistent biotic interactions of a Gondwanan conifer from Cretaceous Patagonia to modern Malesia, Communications Biology (2020). 

doi.org/10.1038/s42003-020-01428-9

Journal information: Communications Biology

Provided by Cleveland Museum of Natural History

An evolving situation: How humans force plants and animals to change

Our way of life exerts incredible selection pressures on the natural world

Thu, Nov 26, 2020, 01:00

Yvonne Buckley

St Stephen’s Green, Dublin. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw

 

 

Charles Darwin was obsessed with pigeons. To be fair, he was also obsessed with barnacles, earthworms and plants that move and climb about. But pigeons were close to his heart. He owned them, bred them, experimented with them and painstakingly documented them. Darwin’s correspondence shows that pigeons were mentioned in more than 400 letters to and from him over the years.

Darwin does not discuss only his observations on pigeons in this correspondence, but also has some choice commentary on pigeon fanciers, the men he met at the “Columbarian Society”. One he describes as “a queer little fish”, while another was an “odd little man (NB all Pigeons Fanciers are little men, I begin to think)”. It is not recorded what the pigeon fanciers made of Charles Darwin. In any case, he goes on to describe pigeon fancying as “a noble & majestic pursuit, & beats moths [and] butterflies”.

Darwin travelled widely, collected many wild specimens and thought deeply about a huge diversity of animals and plants. So why did pigeons intrigue him? Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and the beginning of modern evolutionary biology, was rooted in his observations and experiments with artificial selection.

Every animal and plant breeder, before Darwin’s time as well as now, understands clearly the importance of inheritance and the role that inherited variation plays in the development and maintenance of breeds.

It is clear to see the role of human preference in purposefully bred varieties and breeds of pigeons, chickens, daffodils, dogs and cows. The prettiest, strongest, tastiest, earliest-flowering or fastest made it into the next generation.

Darwin’s great breakthrough proposed that a parallel mechanism to artificial selection was natural selection. While human preference was critical for determining which individuals got to pass their inherited characteristics on to the next generation of a breed, the environment played that role in the evolution of species by natural selection in the wild.

Middle ground

There is an interesting middle ground between artificial selection and natural selection, which is those animals, plants, fungi and micro-organisms that are unconsciously selected by humans, or which have become attached to our way of life and evolve in concert with our habits. Weeds are a brilliant group of plants that have adapted to our gardens, farms and streets. There is a well-known saying that weeds are just plants in the wrong place. And by wrong, we mean undesirable to a particular human, in a particular place at a particular time.

Bright blue cornflowers (Centaurea cyanus) were once very common weeds of arable fields, but the advent of modern herbicides pushed these plants to field edges and disturbed ground. Some of these weeds of old agricultural systems are now highly endangered themselves and the British plant conservation charity PlantLife lists many of them. The future of the cornflower, which is not native to Ireland, now seems to be as a component of wildflower seed mixes scattered on roadsides, meadows and gardens. It has a past, and a future, very much tied to human activities and preferences.

To survive in modern times you need modern evolutionary solutions. Our most troublesome agricultural weeds are now those that have evolved resistance to multiple herbicides and are often grasses that are weeds of barley, wheat and oats. Even those almost invisible weeds that live in the cracks of our pavements have been busy evolving strategies for survival in the urban jungle.

Exerting pressure

One of my favourite examples of city evolution is the delicate little dandelion-like Holy Hawksbeard (Crepis sancta), which produces large and small seeds. Plants that live in the little scrapes of soil around street trees in a sea of concrete mostly produce the larger seed types that stay within that patch, whereas those that grow in continuous open ground produce the smaller type. Smaller seeds have the ability to disperse farther to find suitable patches.

Like weeds, pigeons have become accustomed to human habitats, and the wild cliffs of the original rock dove species have turned into the steep city canyons and junk food diet of feral pigeons. Look around you and notice the incredible selection pressures that our way of life is exerting on the natural world. What does the future hold for weeds, pigeons and us?

Yvonne Buckley is an ecologist, Irish Research Council laureate and professor of zoology at Trinity College Dublin

 

December sky: Jupiter and Saturn to appear closest to each other since 400 years ago

Christmas treat will see gas giants visible together in telescope along with their moons

Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 11:24 Updated: Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 13:52

John Flannery

A file combination photograph of Jupiter (L) and Saturn as taken by the Subaru telescope on Mount Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii. Photograph: Tokyo Astronomical Observatory

 

 

For some celestial events you really do have to wait almost a lifetime.

Jupiter and Saturn met three times in the sky during 1981, but it was while I was only figuring out the basics of astronomy as a teenager. The gas giants then had another encounter in May 2000, but on that occasion, they were too deep in the morning twilight to be easily seen.

This month, Jupiter and Saturn convene again on the evening of the 21st when they are just six arcminutes apart. That remarkably small angular separation is equivalent to only one-fifth the apparent diameter of the full moon.

To put it in context, your little finger held up at arm’s length easily covers the moon, so imagine the gap between Jupiter and Saturn as just a fraction the width of your fingernail.

The regular nature of these encounters is because Jupiter orbits the Sun every 11.86 years, but Saturn takes 29.45 years to do so. It is therefore inevitable faster moving Jupiter periodically catches and overtakes Saturn as they circle the zodiac so that every 19.6 years on average, we have what is termed a Great Conjunction.

This year’s conjunction is special though as almost 400 years have elapsed since Jupiter and Saturn were last as close in 1623. Of the next three encounters in 2040, 2060, and 2080, only that of March 15th, 2080, is comparable in closeness.

At the start of December the two planets are two degrees (four moon-widths, or your thumb held at arm’s length) apart low in the southwest after sunset, with Jupiter the brightest “star” in this area of sky, while dimmer Saturn is just to its upper left.

That distance is halved by the 11th, and the gap narrows further to just 0.4 degrees on the 17th when the crescent moon in the area makes for a striking scene. Thereafter, the space between them decreases by about 0.1 degree daily.

As twilight fades on the evening of the December 21st winter solstice, look low in the southwest after 4.45pm for a sight that will be rare, beautiful, and memorable when Jupiter and Saturn are closest. The two will be near the horizon however, and set shortly after 6.30pm, so an unobstructed skyline is necessar for to seeing them.

Although the two planets will not appear to merge as a single point, they will still be extremely close and a wonderful sight. Their distance will only be half that between Mizar and Alcor, the two stars in the middle of the Plough’s handle, although that is not a practical comparison though as both planets are much brighter than those stars.

Binoculars will offer a stunning vista of both planets in the same field-of-view, with some of the brighter moons of Jupiter also visible. You may need to use them at first to sweep up the planets around 4.45pm in the still twilit sky when Jupiter and Saturn are about 10 degrees (one fist-width) above the southwest skyline.

By 5.30pm the pair are only seven degrees up and sinking quickly, but they will be in a darker sky. A half hour later sees that altitude halved, and the two planets will likely appear lower if you do not have a flat horizon towards the southwest. Jupiter and Saturn then exit the evening sky stage at 6.30pm, drawing a final curtain on the drama.

In an eyepiece magnifying about 80 times on a telescope you can glimpse the extraordinary sight of Saturn’s rings, the disk of Jupiter, and the major moons of both planets all at the same time. That view is possible for a couple of days on either side of the 21st running up to Christmas and is bound to be live-streamed by amateur astronomers worldwide – but nothing beats seeing the real thing.

The two planets remain close a few days after their conjunction, and the gap is still only one degree (two moon-widths) at the end of the year. But they are edging towards the sunset glow and both will be difficult to see by mid-January, before going behind the Sun from our perspective later that month.

Great conjunctions have had some importance throughout human history, with the astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) even suggesting the star of Bethlehem may have been a triple conjunction seen in 7 BC. Perhaps thoughts might turn to the Christmas star again this year with this event occurring so close to the 25th? One thing is certain, though: In a world sometimes divided, the Great Conjunction on December 21st will unite many in wonder.

The Moon this month

Last-quarter moon falls on December 8th, new moon on the 14th and first quarter on the 21st, with the final full moon of 2020 on the 30th. A total solar eclipse on the 14th cuts a narrow swathe that starts in the south Pacific, and then tracks across Chile and Argentina, to end off the coast of Namibia. Regular eclipse fans, or umbraphiles, will find themselves unable to travel to the eclipse during the current pandemic, but a handful of tour groups have received permission from some countries to host expeditions to see it.

Other planets this month

Mercury is a morning sky object but is too close to the Sun to be seen in December

Venus is up in the east around 5.30am at the beginning the month but will slowly lose height each passing day to end the year rising just 1½ hours before the Sun. The planet is to the Moon’s lower left on the 12th and to its upper right on the 13th.

Mars continues to burn bright these evenings and does not set until the early hours. It is through a telescope though that the most obvious change is noticed. By the middle of December, the apparent size of the planet’s disk is only half that in early October as it continues to recede from Earth. Mars is directly above the Moon when they are both due south at 10pm on the 23rd.

Glorious Geminids

New moon on the 14th means perfect conditions for the Geminids, one of the richest annual meteor showers. The display peaks on December 13th, and from a dark site you may see a meteor a minute when Gemini climbs highest in the sky after midnight. The shower is rather broad so good rates can be expected the following evening too.

Gemini rises a little before 6pm, but the number of meteors seen will be initially low until the group gets a bit clearer of the horizon. Tracing their path backwards leads to a point of origin known as the radiant which can be found near the bright star Castor.

Geminids are bright and leave persistent trails, possibly due to the nature of the material shed by the shower’s parent body, the asteroid 3200 Phaethon. The object is sometimes dubbed a “rock comet” and solar heating at perihelion – the point in its orbit when it is closest to the sun – cracks its surface, causing dust and other particles to be ejected. The composition of a Geminid meteor is therefore a little harder than the fluff from most comets.

The stream is inclined to Earth’s orbit and we are presently fording its denser regions. But that situation will not last as gravitational perturbations by Jupiter shifts the dust trail. In only a few hundred years our encounters with the Geminids will be no more.

Spaceflight

Japan’s Hayabusa-2 snagged a tiny sample of regolith from the asteroid Ryugu in early-2019, and its return capsule will be dropped off to land in Australia this December 6th when the probe does a flyby of Earth.

Hayabusa-2 has now continued back into solar orbit for a potential rendezvous with two further asteroids in 2026 and 2031. Uniquely, the mission deployed four tiny rovers onto Ryugu’s surface to investigate the environment there.

Evening passes of the International Space Station run until December 10th after which it switches to the morning sky from the 18th. Predictions for your location can be calculated on Heavens Above.

My free annual night sky calendar is now available to download. Although it highlights all the predictable celestial events visible during the year ahead, the sky can still spring surprises such as the beautiful comet Neowise last summer.

*John Flannery is a long-time amateur astronomer with an interest in the history and lore of the sky along with astronomical phenomena observable with the unaided eye. He is a member of the Irish Astronomical Society.