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A Masterpiece of Nature? Yuck!
By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times, August 9, 2010
A friend recently sent around an e-mail with the subject line “lost cat bulletin.” Open the message and — gack! — there was a head-on shot of a star-nosed mole, its “Dawn of the Dead” digging claws in full view and its hallmark nasal boutonniere of 22 highly sensitive feelers looking like fresh bits of sirloin being extruded through a meat grinder.
“I don’t think anyone would come near that cat, much less steal it,” tittered one respondent. Another participant, unfamiliar with the mole, wondered whether this was a “Photoshop project gone bad,” while a third simply wrote, “Ugh.”
We see images of jaguars, impalas and falcons and we praise their regal beauty and name our muscle cars for them. We watch a conga line of permanently tuxedoed penguins, and our hearts melt faster than the ice sheet beneath those adorable waddling feet. Even creatures phylogenetically far removed from ourselves can have an otherworldly appeal: jellyfish, octopus, praying mantis, horseshoe crab.
Yet there are some animals that few would choose as wallpaper for a Web browser — that, to the contrary, will often provoke in a human viewer a reflexive retraction of the nostrils accompanied by a guttural or adenoidal vocalization: ugh, yuck, ew.
Let’s not pussyfoot. They are, by our standards, ugly animals — maybe cute ugly, more often just ugly ugly. And though the science of ugliness lags behind investigations into the evolution of beauty and the metrics of a supermodel’s face, a few researchers are taking a crack at understanding why we find certain animals unsightly even when they don’t threaten us with venom or compete for our food.
Among the all-star uglies are the star-nosed mole, whose mug in close-up, said Nancy Kanwisher, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “is disturbing because it looks like the animal has no face,” or as if its face has been blown away. The blobfish, by contrast, is practically all face — a pale, gelatinous deep-sea creature whose large-lipped, sad-sack expression seems to be melting toward the floor.
“It looks like if you handled it,” said Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, “at the very least you’d get some kind of rash.”
We have the male proboscis monkey and the male elephant seal, with their pendulous, vaguely salacious Jimmy Durantes, and the woolly bat and the vampire bat, their squashed snub noses accentuating their razor-toothed gapes. The warthog’s trapezoidal skull is straight out of Picasso’s “Guernica,” while the warthog’s kin, the babirusa, gives new meaning to the word skulduggery: On occasion, one of its two pairs of curving tusks will grow up and around and pierce right into its skull.
Don’t forget the gargoyles of our own creation, purebred cats and dogs that are stump-limbed, hairless and wrinkled, with buggy eyes and concave snouts, and ears as big as a jack rabbit’s or curled at the tips like rotini. We love them, we do, our dear little mutants, not in spite of their ugliness, but because of it.
As scientists see it, a comparative consideration of what we find freakish or unsettling in other species offers a fresh perspective on how we extract large amounts of visual information from a millisecond’s glance, and then spin, atomize and anthropomorphize that assessment into a revealing saga of ourselves.
“No one would find the star-nosed mole ugly if its star were iridescent blue,” said Denis Dutton, professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. “But the resemblance of the pinkish nose to human flesh subverts our expectations and becomes a perverse violation of whatever values we have about what constitutes normal or healthy human skin.”
Conservation researchers argue that only by being aware of our aesthetic prejudices can we set them aside when deciding which species cry out to be studied and saved. Reporting recently in the journal Conservation Biology, Morgan J. Trimble, a research fellow at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and her colleagues examined the scientific literature for roughly 2,000 animal species in southern Africa, and uncovered evidence that scientists, like the rest of us, may be biased toward the beefcakes and beauty queens.
Assessing the publication database for the years 1994 through 2008, the researchers found 1,855 papers about chimpanzees, 1,241 on leopards and 562 about lions — but only 14 for that mammalian equivalent of the blobfish, the African manatee.
“The manatee was the least studied large mammal,” Ms. Trimble said. Speculating on a possible reason for the disparity, she said, “Most scientists are in it for the love of what they do, and a lot of them are interested in big, furry cute things.”
Or little cute things. Humans and other mammals seem to have an innate baby schema, an attraction to infant cues like large, wide-set eyes, a button nose and a mouth set low in the face, and the universality of these cues explains why mother dogs have been known to nurse kittens, lionesses to take care of antelope kids.
On a first pass, then, “ugliness would be the deviation from these qualities,” said David Perrett, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Tiny, close-set eyes, prominent snout, no forehead to speak of: it sure sounds like a pig.
A helpless baby grows into a healthy, fertile youth, which in humans is visually characterized by clarity of shape, sleekness of form and visibility of musculature, said Wendy Steiner of the University of Pennsylvania, who is author of “Venus in Exile” and “The Real, Real Thing,” to be published this fall. “An animal with saggy skin, whiskers and no neck will look like some old guy who’s lost it,” she joked.
The more readily we can analogize between a particular animal body part and our own, the more likely we are to cry ugly. “We may not find an elephant’s trunk ugly because it’s so remote,” Dr. Dutton said. “But the proboscis on a proboscis monkey is close enough to our own that we apply human standards to it.” You can keep your rhinoplasty, though: the male monkey’s bulbous proboscis lends his mating vocalizations resonant oomph.
People are also keenly, even obsessively vigilant for signs of ill health in others. “That means anything that looks seriously asymmetrical when it should be symmetrical, that looks rough and irregular when it should be smooth, that looks like there might be parasites on the skin or worms under the skin, jaundice or pallor,” Dr. Miller said. “Anything mottled is considered unattractive. Patchy hair is considered unattractive.” We distinguish between the signs of an acquired illness and those of an innate abnormality. Splotches, bumps and greasy verdigris skin mean “possibly infectious illness,” while asymmetry and exaggerated, stunted or incomplete features hint of a congenital problem.
If we can’t help staring, well, life is nasty and brutish, but maybe a good gander at the troubles of others will keep it from being too short. “Deformities provide a lot of information about what can go wrong, and by contrast what good function is,” Dr. Miller said. “This is not just about physical deformities. People who seem crazy are also highly attention-grabbing.”
And as long as we’ve been gawking and rubbernecking, we’ve felt guilty about the urge. In his book “The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution,” Dr. Dutton recounts a passage from Plato in which a man passing by a pile of corpses at the feet of an executioner wants desperately to look, tries to resist and then finally relents, scolding his “evil” eyes to “Take your fill of the beautiful sight!”
The appeal of ugly animals is that neither they nor their mothers will care if you stare, and if you own a pet that others find shocking or ugly, you probably won’t mind if others stare, too.
Joan Miller, vice president of the Cat Fanciers’ Association Inc., said she found the hairless Sphynx cat, with its “huge ears” and only “a minor amount of wrinkling,” to be “absolutely marvelous looking” and “strong as an ox,” although she conceded it sometimes needed to wear a sweater.
Classical beauty is easy, but a taste for the difficult, the unconventional, the ugly, has often been seen as a mark of sophistication, a passport into the rarefied world of the artistic vanguard. “Beauty can be present by its violation,” Dr. Steiner said, and the pinwheel appendages of the star-nosed mole are the rosy fingers of dawn.
Water on Moon Unlikely, a New Study Indicates
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, August 9, 2010
In the long discussion of water on the Moon, a new study contradicts some recent reports that say the Moon had water at the time of its formation. A group of researchers reports in the journal Science that when the Moon was created, some 4.5 billion years ago, there was not much hydrogen on it, and therefore no water.
The researchers determined this by analyzing chlorine isotopes found in lunar rock samples from Apollo missions. The range of chlorine isotopes in lunar samples was 25 times that found in samples from Earth.
If the Moon had significant levels of hydrogen, as Earth did, this range would have been far less, said Zachary D. Sharp, a scientist in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of New Mexico and the study’s lead author.
The chlorine would have bonded with hydrogen, forming compounds like hydrogen chloride, and escaped from the Moon’s surface, he said. The abundance of chlorine points to a lack of hydrogen and water.
“The amount of water on the Moon was way too low for life to have ever have possibly have existed there,” he said.
Most scientists believe the Moon was formed when a large object struck Earth, breaking off a chunk that has since orbited Earth.
On Earth, goes one theory, water was released as steam from molten basalts over time, eventually forming bodies of water.
“An understanding of whether the Moon was dry or wet will help us understand how water appeared on Earth,” Dr. Sharp said.
Deaths double amid Moscow smog
By Anna Smolchenko, The Sunday Morning Herald, August 9, 2010
The daily mortality rate in Moscow has nearly doubled amid record temperatures, an official says, breaking a silence over the effects of a heatwave and smog which show little sign of abating.
The acknowledgment on Monday came after media reports earlier accused authorities of covering up the scale of the disaster that affects millions of Muscovites and forced many to flee the Russian capital.
"In usual times 360-380 people are dying each day. Now it is around 700," said the head of the city's health department, Andrei Seltsovsky, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.
"Our mortality rate has doubled," he added, saying that out of 1500 spaces in city morgues 1300 places were currently occupied.
Amid Russia's worst heatwave in decades, the raging wildfires and burning peat bogs in central Russia have choked Moscow for several days and even sent plumes of smoke as far as neighbouring Finland.
The acrid smog from the fires burning in the countryside dozens of kilometres outside the city is seeping into apartments, offices and even underground into the Moscow metro, forcing Russians to flee the city.
Many of those who stay pull white and blue gauze masks over their faces to protect themselves from the acrid haze cloaking the city.
Media reports had said well-off Muscovites were spending nights at air-conditioned hotels and accused authorities of covering up the true scale of the environmental disaster and smog-related deaths and illnesses.
A doctor with a Moscow ambulance crew told Russia's top opposition daily Novaya Gazeta that the number of ambulance calls and deaths had risen in recent days.
"We have been strictly forbidden to hospitalise people barring the most extreme cases," he said, complaining of hazardous working conditions.
"There are no air conditioners in vehicles and those that are simply do not work. Temperatures inside reach 50 degrees...Sometimes our doctors faint."
A surgeon at a major hospital described a similar picture, saying the smog and heat were taking their toll on both patients and medical staff.
"Air conditioners work only on the floor of the administration, temperatures reach 30 degrees in the operating room," he told Kommersant.
"It's hard to work in these conditions."
Seltsovsky said efforts to store the increased numbers of corpses were being complicated by the desire of many relatives to wait several days before their loved ones are laid to rest.
"This, of course, complicates the situation somewhat," he said.
Many Muscovites laid the blame for the environmental catastrophe on the government which they say is not doing enough to shield them from the smog and heat.
Officials, meanwhile, say conditions would likely deteriorate later in the day but could improve later this week.
Crocodile Fossil Reveals Teeth of a Mammal
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, August 9, 2010
Modern crocodiles have conical teeth they use to grab at prey. Sometime the crocodiles rip off pieces of flesh from their prey, and sometimes they swallow their victims whole. They do not, however, chew their food, as humans and many other mammals do.
But crocodiles that lived 144 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period, had the dental structure to allow for chewing, scientists report in the journal Nature.
The researchers say they discovered a virtually complete skull and skeleton of such a crocodile in southwestern Tanzania.
“It has a very mammalianlike dental organization,” said Patrick M. O'Connor, a paleontologist at Ohio University and the study’s lead author. “What really blew us away were the molarlike teeth in the back of the jaw, with a series of crests and troughs that actually interlocked to help the crocodile eat food.”
The crocodile, known as Pakasuchus, was much smaller than today’s version. An adult was about the size of a house cat, with a head less than three inches long.
Pakasuchus is one of several species of crocodiles from the time period thought to have a mammalian dental structure. The crocodiles lived in Gondwana, a landmass that included present-day Africa, Antarctica, Australia, India and South America.
Fossils of other crocodile species have been found in Africa and South America, but the new fossil is the most complete piece to date, Dr. O’Connor said.
The crocodiles became extinct probably around 65 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous.
