Bruce Taylor

The Weird Stuff

Eukaryote evolution, Zoocentricity No Responses »

Nov 222013

Stewart Brand usually gets credit for the quote, but apparently it was Craig Venter who said it: “If you don’t like bacteria, you’re on the wrong planet. This is the planet of the bacteria.”

Actually, the second part of that, the play on Planet of the Apes, was probably lifted from the title of an article by Stephen Jay Gould, included in his book Full House. When I was asked to review the book, eighteen years ago, one passage blew a hole in my world view: “We live now in the ‘Age of Bacteria.’ Our planet has always been in the ‘Age of Bacteria,’ ever since the first fossils—bacteria, of course—were entombed in rocks more than 3 billion years ago.”

It’s funny that it was Stephen Jay Gould who steered me away from my zoocentricity, because the preeminent explainer of evolutionary biology rarely had much to say about microbes. Pulling one of his books off the shelf and scanning for organism names in the index, I see: ammonites, aphid, angler fish, Archaopteryx, asses, Australopithecus–ah, there’s “bacteria,” with two brief entries–and then, bees, birds, Blatella germanica (a cockroach), blue-footed boobies, boobies again, then brown boobies, brown hyenas, coelecanths….and so it continues until we get to Eschirichia coli, and much later, two entries for “prokaryotes.” That’s it for microbiology in that book (Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes).

Protists don’t rate a single mention. And it is much the same story in Gould’s other works. Even his desk-bending opus ultimum, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, mentions “protistans” just a handful of times, mostly in connection with the observation that gradualism will govern the rate of evolutionary change in “asexual” organisms. (Most protists are as sexy as can be, but let’s leave that aside, for now).

I didn’t bring this up to bash Gould. He wrote mainly for a general readership, and microbiology wasn’t his thing anyway. But perhaps it reveals something that, as late as 2002, it was possible to write a 1,400 page treatise on evolutionary theory in which the only source cited on “protistans” is D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form, published in 1917. And I’m not sure that Gould’s zoocentrism is all that unusual in his field. Certainly, Lynn Margulis (enthusiastically wrong about some things, but the best friend a microbe ever had) often complained loudly about the dominance of “zoologists who today call themselves ‘evolutionary biologists’.” (Acquiring Genomes, 26) Last year, there was an international congress on evolutionary biology in the big city down the road from my village. Scanning the program, I noticed that most of the talks were centred around macroorganisms of one kind or another (tigers, termites, toadstools, and tumtum trees). A friend who teaches evolutionary biology at CUNY was in town for the event. “Don’t worry,” he teased me, “there’s bound to be one or two people giving talks about the weird stuff!”

As my friend knows quite well, here on the “Planet of the Bacteria,” the “weird stuff” is really creatures like us: great, shambling, genetically-coordinated quasi-colonies, lurching around with more than 37 trillion specialized cells inside them (and hosting perhaps ten times that number of hitchhiker microbes). The protists seem almost normal, by comparison, though even they are evolutionary oddballs. All of us eukaryotes are weird, but, some of us are weirder than others. While plants, fungi and animals make up only a few remote twigs at one end of the eukaryote lineage, the long sideways-projecting stalk on which they sit– comprising what is sometimes called (though I can hardly say it without snickering) “Empire Eukaryota”– is made up mainly of (royal fanfare, please) “Kingdom Protista.”

Needless to say, the natural history of eukaryota was mostly written by protists, and by all rights the study of them ought to be central to evolutionary theory. Bear in mind that if the original ancestral eukaryote were to emerge from some magic time capsule and land in the petri dish of a modern biologist, it would almost certainly be classified as a protist. And, if you look closely enough at some of our 37 trillion cells, our kinship with them is hard to miss. Our lungs and fallopian tubes have genuine cilia that beat just like those of the ciliated protozoa. Our sperm have flagella (really just another kind of cilium), no different, structurally, from those that power any flagellated protist. Our bodily fluids are patrolled by ravenous amoeboids that roam around, engulfing bacteria and other other invaders. Out here in the “Empire” of nucleated cells, protists are us.

Why are you interested in that?

Protistology No Responses »

Nov 182013

I used to study English Literature. I did that for a decade and a half, at two universities, and eventually wrote a doctoral thesis on “Postwar American Poetry.” In all the years I spent researching poetry, nobody ever asked me why I would want to study something like that. It’s not that everybody loves poetry. Most people, in my experience, really cherish the time they don’t spend reading poetry. But some people do like it well enough, and we all know that people of that kind are out there, somewhere.

Protists are different. Apparently, if you happen to be interested in those, you have some explaining to do. In fact, it’s the first thing most people ask, when I tell them how I’ve been spending my days: Why are you interested in that?

It always deflates me a bit, which is fine, I would not want to be too puffy. But would they ask me that if I were studying…tigers?

John Goodrich, Tiger Researcher (Image: A. Rybin. Click to see source)

I’m pretty sure that guy never has to explain why he loves what he does. He catches live tigers in the wild and cuddles their babies! That’s a solid 40 megafonzies on the Cool-O-meter. But when I mention that I’m interested — very, very interested — in “protists,” I can tell that some people do not necessarily think it is a good thing.

Part of the problem is the word “protist” itself. From a public-relations point of view, it is a mess. First, it sounds too much like a certain other English word. When the subject of protists comes up (as it always does, if I can work it into the conversation) people often mishear me, and think that I like to study and observe “protests.” Which is not so implausible…I’m sure there are “protest watchers” out there, as there are “storm chasers” and “chicken hypnotizers.” But even when I spell the word out, people over a certain age (my generation, that is) don’t recognize it anyway. We grew up calling these bugs either “algae” (the placid green ones that remind us of plants) or “protozoa” (the colourless ones that boogie around and try to eat each other, like miniature animals).

These days, the word “protozoa” is being phased out, in professional circles. The reason for this is perfectly sound. It means “first animals,” and protists are not animals of any kind. The mushrooms in your fridge are more closely related to you (and your dog, and your dog’s fleas), than any of the protists in your koi pond. But although both words were coined in the 19th century, the word “protozoa” is the one that caught on and stuck. In marketing terms, it has good “brand awareness.” So, here we have a field, protozoology, that was already on the margins of the public mind, which now goes by a “new” and unfamiliar name.

And finally, once we’ve established what it is we are talking about, some people still fail to see–amazing as it sounds!–why a person might care about such a thing. Even biologists, who should know better, tend to think of protists as a weird little sideshow in the circus of life, where the big tent is reserved for elephants, horses and (needless to say) tigers.

I’ll talk about that in my next post, I think.

First, though, since I’ve been belabouring the word “protist,” what exactly do we mean by it? This blog is about protistology, so there will be ample time to explore that in depth, but a quick working definition might be useful. If I may adapt the excellent and succinct definition offered by Psi Wavefunction, a protist is any organism that is not a bacterium, not a fungus, not a plant, and not an animal. Which means that protistology is, effectively, the study of organisms that nobody else cares about.

Any eukaryote that is not a plant, an animal, or a fungus. – See more at: http://skepticwonder.fieldofscience.com/2008/11/what-is-protist-eukaryotic-tree-of-life.html#sthash.Yup6wXZj.dpuf

Outsider Science

Protistology No Responses »

Nov 142013

When I was eight years old, I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up.

I wanted to be this guy:

Forty-five years later, I finally look a bit like that. It’s not the wild hair and bulging eyes (which I’ve always had): it’s the glassware. At 53, I finally have an erlenmeyer flask! I also have a box of pipettes, and a big fat falcon tube filled with a yellow fluid that might well turn into a powerful explosive if I ever let it dry out. I do not have a brain in a jar, but it’s only a matter of time.

In short: at a fairly late stage of life I am trying to become, in my own small way, a kind of scientist. I have no scientific training at all. I am a poet, who happens to have written a bit about protists and microscopy. I’m hoping this blog will give me a place to write about the slow and sometimes awkward process of learning to think scientifically.

What I’m beginning here could be described as a “citizen science” blog, but that term doesn’t sit well with my inner eight-year-old. “Citizen science” is all about “making a contribution,” like those diligent bird-counters, reporting their sightings to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology; or telescope fanciers up till all hours, sifting the barely-perceptible specks from the almost-invisible flecks. There’s nothing wrong with doing your bit for the cause, but that is not what pulled me into this. (And really, can you picture a power-hungry “citizen scientist” cackling over a fuming flask?)

Since we do have to distinguish the self-taught amateur from the qualified pro (if only to decide who gets a turn at the electron microscope), I prefer the term “outsider science,” which hints at the kind of not-altogether-healthy obsessiveness that drives a person like me. Of course, that epithet is, if anything, even less flattering. While the “citizen scientist” may be, at worst, a gormless do-gooder, the “outsider scientist” appears to be (in the journalistic imagination, at least) a flat-out crank:

(Image: Reidar Hahn, via Symmetry Magazine)

But if the “outsider scientist” is a kook, he is at least a passionate one; and I’m not too proud to admit that something in that picture kind of reminds me of me.

Also, protistology is itself something of an “outsider science,” which has a long history of providing an intellectual home for dedicated autodidacts. I will talk a bit about that in my next post, or the one after that.

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