Can I add “Published Authority on the Female Orgasm” to my CV now?

Our rebuttal to claims about the adaptive significance of the female orgasm has been published, as Zietsch & Santtila's study is not evidence against the by-product theory of female orgasm. I blogged about this a while back, and also dealt with some counter-arguments, and Elisabeth Lloyd thought my arguments were strong enough to be incorporated into a letter, so there you go…now I just need a badge or a t-shirt with a proclamation about my expertise on it.

Wallen K, Myers PZ, Lloyd EA (2012) Zietsch & Santtila’s study is not evidence against the by-product theory of female orgasm. Animal Behaviour http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2012.05.023

In which the co-blogger attempts action at a distance

Dinosaur v. Mammal. Photo taken from my back porch.

Our fearless leader is down, so it’s time to put on our Sixpak Chopra outfits for a little visualization. Imagine the Audubon’s cottontail in the image as the demons that have possessed PZ’s gastrointestinal system, and the jay as our Waves O’ Healing Energy® preparing to kick the rabbit’s butt. It’s guaranteed infinitely more effective than the most popular homeopathic remedies commonly available.

Spoiler: half a second after this image was taken, the jay hopped on to the rabbit’s butt, chasing him away from the sunflower seeds.

The best thing I’ve read today

I know it’s early, but I expect it to be the best thing for a few days yet. David Byrne writes about his love affair with sound, and I came away from it feeling like I’d both learned something new and that it fit well with other ideas I already had — it was a revelation to see how well music and evolution fit together.

Because music evolves. Byrne’s thesis is that it evolves to fit its environment (sound familiar?), and that you can see the history of a genre of a music in its sound. It’s all about the spaces it was played in, which shapes the kind of sound can be used effectively…and he makes the strong point that you can’t fully appreciate the music of a culture or a time when you transpose it to a different space. He goes through all kinds of music, from medieval chants (cathedrals!) to hip hop (cars!). The iPod isn’t just a passive delivery system for generic music, it influences how music will sound — ear buds represent a completely different sonic environment from a cluttered dance club.

Apparently, David Byrne is an Ecological Developmental Biology kind of guy. I like him even more already.

Because that’s what eco devo is all about. Development and environment are all intertwined, with one feeding back on the other — species are products of the spaces they evolved and developed in, and cannot be comprehended in isolation. It’s one of the weird things about modern developmental biology, that we preferentially study model systems, organisms that have been able to thrive when ripped out of their native environments and cultured in the simplified sterility of the lab. My zebrafish live now in small uncluttered tanks with heavily filtered water; their environment is like iPods, simple, streamlined, focused with relatively little resonance. The zebrafish evolved in mountain streams feeding into the Ganges, in lands seasonally flooded by great monsoons, a vast and complicated opera hall of an environment. A wild zebrafish and a lab zebrafish are two completely different animals.

Oh, look. I have a new metaphor for issues I’ve been thinking about for some time. Thanks, David Byrne!

I might just make his essay part of the readings for my developmental biology course next term.

California’s largest lake is doomed

The Salton Sea with Mount San Jacinto in the background

The Salton Sea with Mount San Jacinto in the background — CC photo

A week ago today a good-sized storm blew into Southern California’s desert off the Sea of Cortez, a.k.a. the Gulf of California. In the Salton Basin (a.k.a. the Salton Trough) north of the Gulf winds averaged 40 mph or so, with gusts above 60. The Salton Sea fills the lowest part of the Salton Basin and the winds churned that water, roiled up its murky, anaerobic depths, and released a cloud of stench, mostly hydrogen sulfide, into the air. People who’ve lived in the Basin are used to that smell, but last weekend the wind off the Sea of Cortez picked up that mixed hydrogen sulfide cocktail and blew it to Los Angeles. On Monday, air quality management districts got complaint calls from residents of Simi Valley, almost 200 miles from the Salton Sea.

It took a day or so before everyone agreed that the Salton Sea was to blame for the stench, and now a few more people are aware of the fact that it’s in trouble. There are plans to “fix” the Sea that would cost several billion dollars, which is getting no traction at all in Sacramento given rabid anti-tax sentiment in California. But “fixing” the Sea in the long term is futile, and the reason involves the Colorado River, plate tectonics, and — possibly — the Grand Canyon.

[Read more…]

Death Valley and Temperature Records

Death Valley, January 2005

Death Valley on a much cooler day in January 2005, with Pleistocene Lake Manly reemergent at Badwater.

I say more about this over at KCET, but I’ve found it kind of surprising that today’s barrage of coverage of the World Meteorological Organization’s official dethroning of the 1936 El Azizia, Libya temperature record didn’t mention this fascinating work that came out a few months back.

The short version of today’s news: a global group of meteorologists, including Libyan scientist, Khalid El Fadli, climate director of the Libyan National Meteorological Center, went over the old records that secured El Azizia’s spot in fifth-grade geography texts as the site of the world’s highest recorded temperature. That much-memorized datum, an air temperature peak of 136°F (or 58°C for those of you in civilized countries) 90 years ago today on September 13, 1922, turns out to have been an artifact of difficult-to-read equipment combined a newbie weather technician working at an Italian Army post. The peak actual temperature that day was likely 7°C cooler, putting it well within the range of normal hellishly hot for the neighborhood I just moved out of. That puts Death Valley’s July 10, 1913 reading of  134°F/56.7°C back in the first place spot it ought to have enjoyed for the last 90 years.

El Fadli, by the way, had to go underground for a bit during the revolution. His colleagues lauded him today for taking risks to get this study done, and we wouldn’t have had this info without his taking significant personal risks as Qaddafi’s regime went through its death throes.

The thing is that those official records have a bit of built-in sampling error: namely, they derive from the places where we’ve managed to maintain weather stations for long enough to keep records. The WMO has more than 11,000 weather stations worldwide, but “worldwide” is a big place, and that works out to an average of one weather station for every 13,000 square kilometers of land surface. Admittedly, much of the really underrepresented land surface is in Antarctica, where it’s unlikely any high air temperature records will be set anytime soon. But that’s still a lot of potentially hot land not being monitored, in the deserts of Asia, Africa, and even the Sonoran Desert in North America.

The research that made the press a few months back involved measuring Land Skin Temperature (LST), which I’d embarrassingly typoed as “Land Sin Temperature” at KCET until just now, via infrared satellite monitoring of the Earth’s surface by way of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometers on two NASA satellites. The researchers, led by Steve Running of the University of Montana, found a number of places well away from the nearest WMO-approved weather station that had astonishingly high surface temperatures. The record? A dark and gravelly spot in Iran’s Lut Desert, where on one particularly warm day in 2005 the LST reached 159.3°F/70.7°C. The place on Earth with the second-hottest LST was an unspecified spot in the bush in Queensland, which will no doubt delight the Strines in the crowd. That temperature: 156.7°F/69.3°C. The Turpan Basin in Xinjiang, China took third place at 152.2°F /66.8°C.

Of course air temperature and LST are different animals. The WMO requires that air temperature measurement be taken 1.2-2 meters off the ground in the shade, which means comparing air temps and LST is kind of comparing apples with the sun-baked soil at the base of the apple tree. Think walking barefoot on the beach on a nice day with air temperatures in the 80s. Differences of 50°F between air temperature and LST aren’t unheard of. And until we plant a WMO-approved weather station out on the Lut Desert, we probably won’t have a good idea how those temperatures compare with Death Valley’s.

But we do know one thing: when Running’s team listed the places on Earth with the hottest Land Skin Temperatures, Death Valley didn’t make the list. So the hottest place on Earth, according to the news today, probably isn’t. It’s just the hottest one for which we have a recorded air temperature. Which doesn’t make as snappy a headline. But that’s okay: the California Desert still has that 767 straight days without rain at Bagdad, about 40 miles north of where I’me sitting right now. It’s at most in second place after the Atacama Desert, which has some places where rain’s never been recorded, ever. But we’re’ good at being in second place around here.