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An illustrated reconstruction of the head of the newly discovered Triassic dinosaur Tawa hallae.
OBSERVATORY: Bones Show Early Divergence of Dinosaur Lineage
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, December 15, 2009
The early evolution of dinosaurs, in the late Triassic period, is fuzzy, to say the least. Paleontologists know that the first dinosaurs appeared about 230 million years ago, but fossil evidence is so spotty that it is unclear where and when the major lineages — theropods, sauropods and ornithischians — began to diverge.
Some excellent 215-million-year-old fossils unearthed in Ghost Ranch, in northern New Mexico, are helping to clarify things. The bones, of a theropod that the discoverers have named Tawa hallae, support the idea that the lineages diverged early on in the part of the supercontinent Pangea that is now South America.
“What Tawa does is it helps signify the relationships at the base of dinosauria,” said Sterling J. Nesbitt, a University of Texas researcher and lead author of a paper in Science describing the find. Dr. Nesbitt worked on the fossils while at the American Museum of Natural History and Columbia University.
Like later theropods, Tawa walked on two legs and had sharp teeth for tearing apart its food: other animals. The most complete specimen, a juvenile, was about six feet long.
Tawa shares some features with an early South American dinosaur, Herrerasaurus, that had been a source of confusion for paleontologists. Tawa, in effect, shows that Herrerasaurus was a theropod. Because Herrerasaurus was found near some early sauropods and ornithischians, the new finding strongly suggests that all three main lineages diverged early on.
The New Mexico fossil beds included several other theropods that the scientists found were more closely related to different groups of South American theropods than to each other. That suggests theropods diverged and radiated from South America. And if theropods had that dispersal pattern, the findings suggest, the other lineages probably did, too.
Did You Hear the One About the Former Scientist?
By KENNETH CHANG, The New York Times, December 15, 2009
A biologist walks into a comedy club...
Actually, the story begins earlier. A biologist who had abandoned academia and was working in San Francisco on contract as a computer programmer for Charles Schwab walked into a Laundromat ...
The former biologist was Tim Lee. After completing his undergraduate biology degree at the University of California, San Diego, he worked at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography for a while before he realized he needed a doctorate to do the interesting work. But by the time he finished his Ph.D. at the University of California, Davis, he had realized he hated academia.
“I just didn’t want to read any more papers,” Dr. Lee said. “I didn’t want to write any more papers.”
Dr. Lee then worked as a computer programmer, and he moved to San Francisco. During a vacation, he read memoirs of comedians like Bill Cosby, Bob Newhart and Jerry Seinfeld, and he wrote some jokes.
Then he walked into a Laundromat, which was holding an open microphone night for anyone who wanted to take a shot at being a comic. Dr. Lee told about a dozen jokes. Only four or five of them got laughs, but that was good enough for the host to offer some encouraging words.
Dr. Lee wrote more jokes. He went to more open mikes. He eventually got a paying gig — $35 from a comedy club in Santa Cruz, Calif. Along the way, he started telling science jokes, and he discovered that PowerPoint made a good comedy prop.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, Brian Malow, who calls himself “earth’s premier science comedian,” and Norm Goldblatt, a physicist who performs standup as a side gig, have been telling science jokes for years.
“It’s not as limiting as it sounds,” Mr. Malow said. “Science is in everything.”
Even so, Mr. Malow finds he sometimes needs to add footnotes. One joke he tells is, “I used to be an astronomer, but then I got stuck on the day shift.”
“When I have a savvier audience,” Mr. Malow said, “I have to point out that joke could be offensive to solar or radio astronomers,” who do work during the day. And since many telescopes now can be operated remotely, even astronomers working with optical telescopes now do much of their work during the day shift.
“That joke is kind of weird that way,” Mr. Malow said. “We have that traditional image of an astronomer. Astronomers should work at night, theoretically. It’s fun to say that.”
Mr. Malow said that he expected the science comedy field to grow. “That won’t be a niche at all,” he said. “That’ll be too broad. It’ll be, ‘I just do humor about the spleen.’ ”
Still, linear regression and ocean acidification are rarely fodder for standup, as they were for Dr. Lee in his New York City debut at a small venue called the Monkey in Gramercy last Wednesday, seven years after walking into the Laundromat. (He returns to New York this week for two more nights of shows at the Monkey.)
“My act is a parody of a seminar,” he said. “I think my audience is everyone from age 14 who is kind of nerdy to age 65 who is kind of nerdy.”
He joked about linear regression (a rumination about what kind of people post cat videos on YouTube), period doubling in chaos (which he likens to the splitting of behaviors of people as they become more and more drunk) and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
He explained this fundamental concept of quantum physics — that the more precisely the position of a particle is measured, the less is known about the particle’s momentum, and vice versa — with a photograph of a men’s room with television screens above the urinals. The designer “clearly didn’t understand the uncertainty principle,” Dr. Lee said.
“The problem is the more I know what’s on TV,” he went on, “the less I know about where I’m aiming.”
Dr. Lee said his first priority was being funny, not teaching science, but “hopefully people get the kernel of something.”
If humor, as some say, is truth plus absurdity, and if science is about uncovering truth, he said, “all I have to do is add absurdity to that.”
Not all science, however, is equally absurd. “I was trying to do matrix algebra jokes,” Dr. Lee said. “It’s never worked.”
Stephen Bodi, who had encountered Dr. Lee’s comic videos on YouTube (which have found moderate success with about two million views), went to Manhattan from Long Island to see him in person for the first time. “It’s very cerebral comedy,” Mr. Bodi said, “but it’s also very down to earth.”
The science training also came into use Wednesday when an audience member became overly boisterous, and then, when the bouncer asked for quiet, another spectator complained and called the police.
“There is a lot of thinking on your feet,” Dr. Lee said, not unlike when he defended his doctoral thesis. “That was good training for comedy. Unfortunately, I couldn’t call in the police for my thesis defense.”
A biologist walks into a comedy club. How does the story end? That stumped Dr. Lee, and he said he would think about it.
A couple of days later, he sent an e-mail message with this response: “A biologist walks into a comedy club. The owner asks, ‘Why’d you select this club?’ Biologist says, ‘Well, it was the natural selection.’ ”
Case Shined First Light on Abuse of Children
By HOWARD MARKEL, M.D., The New York Times, December 15, 2009
“Mamma has been in the habit of whipping and beating me almost every day,” the little girl testified. “She used to whip me with a twisted whip — a rawhide.
“I have now on my head two black-and-blue marks which were made by Mamma with the whip, and a cut on the left side of my forehead which was made by a pair of scissors in Mamma’s hand; she struck me with the scissors and cut me. ... I never dared speak to anybody, because if I did I would get whipped.”
If the words sound depressingly familiar, it is because they could have come from any number of recent news accounts — or, for that matter, popular entertainment, like the recently opened movie “Precious,” which depicts the emotional and sexual abuse of a Harlem girl.
In fact, though, the quotation is from the 1874 case of Mary Ellen McCormack, below, a self-possessed 10-year-old who lived on West 41st Street, in the Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan. It was Mary Ellen who finally put a human face on child abuse — and prompted a reformers’ crusade to prevent it and to protect its victims, an effort that continues to this day.
Tellingly, the case was brought by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. In 1874, there were no laws protecting children from physical abuse from their parents. It was an era of “spare the rod and spoil the child,” and parents routinely meted out painful and damaging punishment without comment or penalty.
Mary Ellen had been orphaned as a baby. Her father, Thomas Wilson, was a Union soldier who died in the Second Battle of Cold Harbor, in Virginia. Her mother, Frances, boarded the baby with a woman living on Mulberry Bend, on the Lower East Side, while working double shifts as a laundress at the St. Nicholas Hotel.
This arrangement cost $2 a week, consuming her entire widow’s pension. When she lost her job, she could no longer afford to care for her daughter and was forced to send her to the city orphanage on Blackwells Island.
A few years later, Mary Ellen was adopted by a Manhattan couple, Thomas and Mary McCormack. But Thomas died soon after the adoption, and his widow married Francis Connolly. Unhappy and overburdened, the adoptive mother took to physically abusing Mary Ellen.
Sometime in late 1873, the severely battered and neglected child attracted the attention of her neighbors. They complained to the Department of Public Charities and Correction, which administered the city’s almshouse, workhouse, insane asylums, orphanages, jails and public hospitals. Even the hard-boiled investigator assigned to Mary Ellen’s case, Etta Angell Wheeler, was shocked and became inspired to do something.
Frustrated by the lack of child-protection laws, Wheeler approached the A.S.P.C.A. It proved to be a shrewd move. Mary Ellen’s plight captured the imagination of the society’s founder, Henry Bergh, who saw the girl — like the horses he routinely saved from violent stable owners — as a vulnerable member of the animal kingdom needing the protection of the state.
Bergh recruited a prominent lawyer, Elbridge Gerry (grandson of the politician who gave his name to gerrymandering), who took the case to the New York State Supreme Court. Applying a novel use of habeas corpus, Gerry argued there was good reason to believe that Mary Ellen would be subjected to irreparable harm unless she was removed from her home.
Judge Abraham R. Lawrence ordered the child brought into the courtroom. Her heart-wrenching testimony was featured in The New York Times the next day, April 10, 1874, under the subheading “Inhuman Treatment of a Little Waif.”
“She is a bright little girl,” the article said, “with features indicating unusual mental capacity, but with a careworn, stunted and prematurely old look. Her apparent condition of health, as well as her scanty wardrobe, indicated that no change of custody or condition could be much for the worse.”
Ms. Connolly was charged and found guilty of several counts of assault and battery. Mary Ellen never returned to her adoptive home, but her temporary placement in a home for delinquent teenagers was not much of an improvement. In a lifesaving act of kindness, Etta Wheeler, her mother and her sister volunteered to raise Mary Ellen in bucolic North Chili, N.Y., outside Rochester.
At 24, Mary Ellen married Louis Schutt. The couple had two children of their own, along with three children of Schutt’s from a previous marriage, and Mary Ellen passed on her good fortune by adopting an orphan girl. By all accounts, she was a superb and caring mother. She died in 1956, at 92.
Mary Ellen’s case led Bergh, Gerry and the philanthropist John D. Wright to found the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in December 1874. It was believed to be the first child protective agency in the world.
In the years since, the society has helped rescue thousands of battered children, created shelters to care for them and, working with similar groups and agencies in cities across the nation, instituted laws that punish abusive parents.
Gone are the days when beasts of burden enjoyed more legal protection than children. In recent years, a broad spectrum of programs, diagnostic and reporting protocols, safe houses and legal protections have been developed to protect physically or sexually abused children.
But every day, at least three children die in the United States as a result of parental mistreatment. Many more remain out of sight and in harm’s way. Mary Ellen’s story reminds us of a simple equation: How much our society values its children can be measured by how well they are treated and protected.
Dr. Howard Markel is a professor of pediatrics, psychiatry and the history of medicine at the University of Michigan.
