Here is a photo of something I never thought I'd see, let alone have it happen in my own bathroom!
This is the handle of a Braun Oral-B electric toothbrush that I bought some time in the past year.
It developed spreading dark areas which resisted removal.
Though the brush was never left in water, and was kept dry, the areas grew and amalgamated.
Being an environmental mycologist, I eventually made a tape-lift, and was rather surprised to see
that the dark areas were colonies of a sporulating mould - probably a species of Phoma.
When I phoned Braun, they suggested I send it to their depot somewhere in Vancouver,
which would get it back to me in 3 weeks.
You'd think they could do better than that.   I don't want it back!
It doesn't look as if there's any mould-retardant in the plastic.
But perhaps more importantly, I may have inadvertently discovered a mould that can eat plastic...

It's November, and mushrooms are popping up everywhere (so why are a Rhodo and an Azalea in our garden flowering?) However, this message is to show off one of the more spectacular mushrooms, Gymnopilus spectabilis, which pops out, not up.  Our local mountainside Park has many thousands of trees, but I have seen this beautiful big, bright yellow mushroom on only one. It tends to produce a group of fruit bodies, but as you can see in the pictures, it has outdone itself here...

How Do We Come Up With Research Problems in Mycology?

How do we come up with research problems in Mycology?
(This is an excerpt from Chapter 25 of the new 4th Edition of The Fifth Kingdom)

During a 3 km hike in late March up a steep trail to Spirit Lake near Skidegate, Haida Gwaii (formerly Queen Charlotte Islands), fruiting colonies of a little lichenized mushroom, Lichenomphalia (Omphalina) ericetorum, drew my attention no fewer than 27 times.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this was that almost no other mushrooms were in evidence (though there was lots of a beautiful yellow jelly fungus called Heterotextus (formerly Guepiniopsis) alpinus (Dacrymycetales), fruiting on rotting branches). Swamp candles and salmonberry (and dandelions) were in flower.

Science always begins with an accumulation of observations. As I saw the little mushrooms again and again (they are also illustrated on the front cover of The Fifth Kingdom), I began to ask myself questions about this successful little fungus.

(1) Why was it so common in early Spring when so few others were to be seen?

(2) What gave it a competitive edge over all the other macrofungi, enabling it to fruit even before the usual Spring discomycetes? Perhaps the answer lay in the fact that it is a lichenized fungus, even though the mushrooms themselves contain no algal cells. I imagined that its symbiosis with the unicellular dark green alga Coccomyxa, which covered the surface of the wood around the little agarics, had given it a boost of photosynthesis-derived energy. But that was mere conjecture. More questions bubbled up in my mind as I walked.

(3) How long does the mushroom take to develop?

(4) How long does it go on producing mushrooms (and how long does each mushroom last)? This would call for repeated visits to the trail, but could be answered in a reasonable time-span (It has been suggested to me that this species can probably fruit in all months of the year, given the right conditions - that would make it a rare breed).

(5) How extensive are the individual colonies? Judging by the occurrence of the fruit bodies - and those I saw bore from one to almost 50 mushrooms - they seemed to range in extent from about 10cm to about 2m. This could easily be quantified and expressed statistically.  It would need to be related to climatic data on temperature (degree days?) and moisture (see 7 below).

(6) How much algal biomass does it take to support each mushroom? Some tricky observations and manipulations called for here.

(7) What conditions stimulated it to fruit? I realized immediately that this could be broken down or analyzed into a number of factors. (A) Over what range of temperature will it fruit? (B) What level of moisture does it require in the substrate? (C) What kind of climatic (seasonal) history encourages it to fruit? (D) What range of pH will it tolerate? (E) What levels of inorganic nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, does it require? Wood is notoriously low in nitrogen, and is presumably not replete with phosphorus either. (F) Since the lichen seemed to prefer better-lit locations near the path, what light levels does it (or its alga, Coccomyxa) need? This could be quantified, and might also lead to a consideration of day-length and degree days, which are already known to influence many flowering plants.

(8) Which substrates does it prefer? It seems clear that the alga must precede the fungus, and seemed to grow here only on well-rotted wood, probably of conifers, though I have seen it fruiting on the ground among mosses on Vancouver Island.

(9) Which wood-rotting fungi precede the alga - Do they represent particular taxa or could they be any among many?

(10) How long after the woody substrate becomes available does the mushroom fruit? Long-term question, hard to answer.

(11) Which locations permit growth and fruiting? I have already mentioned rotten wood, in fairly well-lit places, but to be more specific, most of the colonies were on rotten stumps, and within 50cm of ground level.  Why not higher as well?

(12) I saw many patches of algae without mushrooms: Did this mean that the fungus was absent, or just that it wasn't yet fruiting?

(13) Can the basidiomycetous fungus be grown in axenic culture (that means, without its domesticated alga)?  The mycobionts of many ascolichens have been brought into axenic culture (they look weird, and don't produce ascomata).

(14) Can the lichen be synthesized in the lab.? Under what conditions and from what kind of materials can the symbiosis be initiated?

You can come up with hypotheses on many of these issues, which could be falsified or proven correct. Many of these questions could be answered by prolonged and repetitive observations.  Some would require experiments. Some would require long-term studies that might well be beyond the purview of a PhD thesis project.

Those are just the questions that occurred to me during and soon after a morning hike. Perhaps some of them have already been answered. But what I have just written is a (fairly primitive) example of how scientists look at the world. (1) Make observations. (2) Analyze them and make connections among those observations. (3) Using the new database, think of possible explanations for some or all of the observed phenomena. These Œexplanations‚ may be presented in the form of hypotheses. Some of the hypotheses will probably be shown to be wrong. Others may fit all of the available data, and may be accepted for the time being as probably true. But these may still be shown to be false if newly acquired data do not fit. So goes the process of science. Observe. Question. Hypothesize. Test. Re-hypothesize. And so on.

It is now apparent to me that Lichenomphalia ericetorum could easily form the subject of one or more Ph.D. theses, or of many experiments. Possibly, some of them have been done - after all, we already know that it is a lichen, even though that isn't obvious to the naked eye. But there are very few basidiolichens, and I would be surprised if we had the answers to all the questions I have raised. Would you like to find some of those answers, or to answer other questions about fungi (and believe me, there are lots)? If so, mycology is for you. 

October 29, 2011

I have ten fairy rings in my courtyard. Do I live in the Magic Kingdom? No, I just happen to have an abundant fruiting of a tiny mushroom called Arrhenia retiruga growing on the moss that covers the bricks. I have seen it in the past two years, but never as numerous as it is now, at the end of October 2011.  Although it sounds as if you are clearing your throat when you say it, this genus was actually named in honour of a botanist called J.P. Arrhenius.

The fruit bodies are tiny - mostly only a few millimetres across - and tend to be one-sided, thin and rather petal-like, without a stipe. The hymenium is almost smooth, with shallow veins, but nothing resembling gills. The main reason it is growing at my house is the moss that covers much of our small courtyard - this fungus is almost always associated with mosses, and doesn't seem to be a particularly congenial companion, since the moss looks a bit faded wherever the Arrhenia is growing.

What are “saprophytic” plants all about?

Those of us who penetrate the depths of our local forests in Summer inevitably come across plants which have no chlorophyll. They are always white. Indian pipe (Monotropa uniflora) is the most common of these in B.C., and is just flowering now in late July of 2011. But there are others, including the rare phantom orchid (which is also flowering now in one of our local forest Parks). Such plants, having no chlorophyll, have generally been called saprophytic plants, the assumption being that since they can’t make their own food by photosynthesis, they must be absorbing nutrition from the decaying remains of other organisms in the soil (as, for example, many fungi do). We have recently learned that this is not the case, and that none of these achlorophyllous plants are, in fact, saprophytic. So what is really going on?

The somewhat weird relationships between the non-photosynthesizing flowering plants in a strange sub-group of the heather, Arbutus and Rhododendron family (Ericaceae), known as the Monotropoideae, and others like the phantom orchid, have recently been clarified, in particular by the work of Martin Bidartondo and his associates in California.

The roots of Monotropa have a fungal mantle outside and something resembling a Hartig net of fungal hyphae inside. The one distinguishing morphological feature is that the fungus sends a single haustorium-like peg into each root cell. So you might think that the plant was in a normal mycorrhizal relationship (such as that between many fungi and Douglas-fir). But since this plant cannot photosynthesize, it has no energy-rich carbon compounds to give the fungus. This eventually led mycologists to suspect that the plant might in fact be parasitic on the fungus. This turned out to be the case. The plant is indeed taking food from the fungus.

The main fungi so far identified as being associated with Monotropa are species of the mushroom genus Russula and some other mushrooms in the Family Russulaceae, and the association is often extremely specific and exclusive.

The monotropoid genera Allotropa and Pityopus have victims in the mushroom genus Tricholoma, and other monotropoid genera are tied to different fungi. For example, the genus Pleuricospora has associates in Gautieria, while Sarcodes and Pterospora have associates in Rhizopogon (Gautieria and Rhizopogon are both hypogeous basidiomycetes - genera which fruit underground). Hemitomes and Monotropopsis associate with Hydnellum,(a tooth fungus) while Cheilotheca and Monotropastrum are associated with members of the Russulaceae.

Whatever the morphology suggests, the fact is that the achlorophyllous Monotropaceae are taking food from the fungi, and no-one knows if they are giving anything at all in exchange.

The key to the situation is that the food in question has been found to be coming from a large neighbouring plant (a green one this time) with which the fungus in question has a normal ectomycorrhizal relationship. So we are looking at a tripartite relationship. Coniferous trees, such as Douglas-fir, make sugars and pass them to Russula. Russula translocates them through its mycelium in the soil, and then, for reasons unknown, hands over part to the Monotropa, which thus seems to exploit the fungus directly, and the conifer at second hand as an epiparasite.

Pseudotsuga ---> Russula ---> Monotropa

So, despite what you read in even the most up-to-date dictionary (and the one I have, the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, was published in 1998), Monotropa is not a saprophyte, and can more correctly be described as parasitic on its associated fungus. Interestingly, mycologists have known this since 1960. It makes me wonder about lexicologists.

How did this strange group of plants and its even stranger fungal relationships evolve? I suspect that it all began in a regular ectomycorrhizal relationship (to judge by the way the fungus still grows around and into the roots of the plant) and somehow became turned around, possibly when the ancestor of the plant group lost its ability to produce chlorophyll, and found that the fungus had another source of food, and could be exploited. Even in normal ectomycorrhizal fungi, food moves back and forth between plant and fungus depending on the needs of each partner. Sometimes the mycorrhizal mantle is a food bank for the tree, and sometimes the root is a food bank for the fungus. So you can see how it might start...

J.R. Leake (2005) presented a wide-ranging discussion of plants which are now known to be parasitic on fungi - the antithesis of a mycorrhizal symbiosis. Leake notes that this phenomenon extends to over 400 achlorophyllous plants in 87 genera. The fungi exploited by these plants represent a wide taxonomic spectrum: Glomeromycota (arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi), basidiomycetes in the Ceratobasidiales, Sebacinales, Tulasnellales, resupinate Aphyllophorales, Russulales, Boletales and Agaricales, as well as ascomycetes in the Pezizales (cup fungi and truffles).

June 7, 2011

The plant kingdom never ceases to spring little visual surprises.
The two photographs came from the garden and the kitchen.
I like the patterns and symmetry that emerge when you look closely...
(a young Sedum infloresecence and a bit of a broccoli head, in case you're interested)

May 31, 2011

I spent a good chunk of yesterday using a folding handsaw to 'fell' a whole bunch (hundreds...) of large broom bushes
which were flowering happily on a rocky knoll in our local Provincial Park.  Why would I want to cut down such wonderful masses of glowing yellow blooms?
Because broom is an invasive alien plant here on the west coast, having been introduced from Europe by a sea captain,
and having subsequently spread all along the Pacific coast.  We can never hope to get rid of it, but I and a few others are trying to extirpate it in our Park,
so that the native wildflowers will be able to take over their space again.
One problem is that broom is a legume: it has nitrogen-fixing bacteria in its roots, so it can grow rapidly in poor soil, thuggishly taking over the space
and out-competing the native plants, which evolved to grow in low-nitrogen soil, and are thus at a double disadvantage.
 
Other plants we have problems with here are English ivy, leather-leaf daphne and holly - invasive aliens all,
and hard to get rid of (I have had sweaty experiences with all of them). 

Interestingly, when I was in Australia, the local biologists were complaining about invasive alien plants - but their problematic species came from South Africa.
When I was in South Africa, the locals complained about yet other invasive aliens, but these came from Australia.

Of course, plants do move around by themselves, and Humans are not to blame for all introductions.
Yet in most cases we are the villains, and those of us who care about our local floras must protect them with the sweat of our brow, and a few aching muscles..

May 5, 2011

I am going to interrupt my happy meanderings through the fungi of Haida Gwaii to mark two unique events, both of which happened yesterday, 2nd May 2011.

The first (and possibly the more important) was the election in my Federal riding,
Saanich and Gulf Islands, of Elizabeth May, National Leader of the Green Party of Canada, to Parliament, handily defeating the long-standing Conservative incumbent (and Cabinet Minister) Gary Lunn. She is the first Green to be elected in a Canadian Federal election, and I feel proud to have played a small part in her campaign.

The second event was the arrival of four copies of our new book, The Genera of Hyphomycetes. These copies are to be signed by all four authors and distributed among them. This book, the product of 20 years' work, looks just as fine as I thought it would, and I look forward to getting copies to my friends and colleagues as soon as I can. The book is just over 1,000 pages long, and has thousands of illustrations. It will be the standard work for years to come, and I am proud to have been part of the team that produced it.
Here is the cover...

May 2, 2011

For the past 5 years several local mycologists including yours truly have been making extended visits to a group of islands off the Northwest coast of British Columbia called Haida Gwaii (they were called the Queen Charlotte Islands until recently, when the ancestral rights of the Haida Nation were recognized). Haida Gwaii is an archipelago of more than 150 islands with a total land area of just over 10,000 square kilometres.

Our visits were undertaken to collect and identify as many of the fungi of the islands as possible. 
Over the five years, we made eight field trips to Haida Gwaii of ten to fourteen days. In all, 113 areas were visited (53 in Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve, 12 in Naikoon Provincial Park),
and we made and preserved 2906 collections representing 615 species, and documented 812 species of fungi (not including lichens) from all available sources. We collected on nineteen islands, 17 of which lie entirely within Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve. The islands range in size from 0.5 hectares to the over 648,000 hectares of Graham Island.

In this blog entry, I show pictures of several of the more unusual fungi we found.
We have now compiled our information and pictures into a book 'The Outer Spores - Mushrooms of Haida Gwaii' which will be published very soon and will be available from my little publishing house, Mycologue.

There are lots (hundreds) of pictures, so I have enough to illustrate quite a few blogs...
Here are the first 4 - a rather diverse bunch!

March 18, 2011

On November 4th 2010, Adolf and Oluna Ceska and I climbed slowly up the
Slektain Trail in John Dean Park. looking for fungi.

Over the course of several hours we found no fewer than 168 species,
a few still unidentified and very rare.  Most were basidiomycetes, though there were 7 ascomycetes.

Here are pictures of some of the most interesting species.
The most conspicuous is the green and yellow parrot mushroom,
but the other more drab pictures are of even more unusual species.
If anyone wants the names, they can E-mail me.

Jan 24, 2011

 After we visited the golden monkeys we drove back, down and down along the old road out of the mountains, winding alongside a new super highway being built straight over the valleys and through the mountains at 100 locations concurrently (The Chinese really are in a hurry to modernize). Our next highlight was the climb up Wudangshan, a mountain sacred to Taoism. We really slogged it out, up and up, thousands of steps, for hours, climbing through a gorgeous forest until we reached the temple at the top. Nearly killed me, but our lithe and attractive young guide strode up with relative ease (she does it often!). My last stop was the World Fair in Shanghai - a city hugely expanded outward and upward since 1987.
I was especially impressed by the Chinese pavilion, with its emphasis on green energy and wonderful children's art, and the extremely clever Canadian pavilion with its amazing movies.

Photos from the China 2010 Trip!

golden monkey - very rare!

Tourist bureau rating of Confucius' temple

Portrait of Confucius 

Confucius' tomb

December 5, 2010

Perhaps my two most memorable places in China were (1) Qufu, the home town of Confucius.
I got the feeling that we should all perhaps spend a little time exploring his philosophy.
His Temple was amazing, and his enormous cemetery was unique - with many tombstones,
but thousands of unmarked graves in an expansive woodland. (2) a most, on first sight, unphilosophical place, one of the colonies where the second-rarest mammal in China, the golden monkey, lives. I was fortunate enough to be taken into the heart of the colony and to spend time one on one with the monkeys, one of whom tried to take off my sock and shoe.

They were beautiful, and their little tussles never seemed to be vicious or to cause any damage.
Also the mothers watched over their babies tenderly as they swung from branch to branch.
Perhaps we could learn something about aggression and how to tame it from these animals.

The Bullet Train in China

China Blog 1

I've just returned from China, having last visited it 23 years ago.
It is almost unrecognizable. In Beijing, all I remembered were the buildings around Tiananmen Square
(The Forbidden City, etc.); in Nanjing it was the city wall; in Shanghai the European-style buildings along the Bund.
Other than the occasional temple or shrine, or heaps of rubble where older houses had recently been demolished,
everything else was new. Shanghai presented serried ranks of tall apartment buildings and splashy commercial skyscrapers.
In Beijing the Bird's nest and the Egg exemplified the new construction. 
Between the major cities run new networks of superhighways
and high-speed trains (The one I took from Beijing to Jinan travelled at 270 km/h).

June 24th 2010

Snap! Crackle! Pop!
Familiar words thanks to breakfast food.
But our language is full of words that do the same thing -
make the sounds of the things they represent.
I suspect that English is richer than any other language
in onomatopoeia. Correct me if I'm wrong.
I'll bet you could think of a hundred examples in a few minutes
Here goes...

Crash, Bang, Thump, Screech, Wail, Boom, Crack,
Slosh, Slap, Thud, Trickle, Splat, Spit, Spatter, Swish, Rustle,
Rip, Tear, Roar, Thunder, Crackle, Cackle, Moan, Rattle,
Drip, Crunch, Munch, Cough, Sigh, Hum, Hiss, Howl,
Chirp, Tweet, Bark, Miaow, Moo, Baa, Caw...

Well, that's quite enough from me...
But I'm sure you could think of lots of others
English is a rather difficult language to learn
- spelling, pronunciation, grammar -
(unless you are very young)
but at least it's easy to say how things sound...

Medusae

Just so you are in the know, since these things aren't fish at all,
I call them by their proper name, medusae.
I think I have a picture of that species, which I found just in front of my house,
on my seashore CD under the heading Cnidaria - look it up.

When I was an undergraduate I found the Cnidaria
(then called Coelenterates) fascinating, and they were always washing up
on the beaches around Liverpool, especially after storms.
I learned them really well for the exams.
We have a common medusa here called the Lion's Mane,
which has a nasty sting.
The common freshwater Hydra you see in High School Biology courses
is an example of the polyp half of a cnidarian life sycle
(its tentacles stick up rather than down, but it has the same kind of
stinging cells).
Corals are also Cnidaria, just the polyp part of the cycle

Birds in Hawaii

Note that I didn't say Birds OF Hawaii.

You almost never see a bird that wasn't introduced in fairly recent times by humans. Sitting on our lanai, we were constantly entertained by the cheerful songs of mynah birds (India 1865) and northern cardinals (USA 1929) in the coconut palms. saffron finches (South America 1960s) and zebra doves (Asia 1922) explored the lawns. wandering tattlers (migratory) patrolled the roads, wild turkeys (USA 1815) the pastures.

Only when we climbed the slopes of Mauna Kea and penetrated the native forests of Metrosideros and Acacia could we find birds that were present before people came. There I was my usual bumbling, incompetent birdwatcher, among the last to see the elusive quarry. (if I saw it at all before it fled).  One day of birdwatching is enough for me. Fortunately, the forest itself was absolutely fascinating. The tall New Zealand Christmas trees (Metrosideros) with their red flowers, and the even taller Acacia, just coming into flower, provided a wonderful habitat for tree ferns, raspberries that had no thorns, and mints that didn't smell or taste of mint, not to speak of the lichens I have already mentioned in the last blog.

March 9, 2010

I have been to the Big Island of Hawaii twice before.  Each time I discover many new things. This time the highlight came on a day when we were out on the slopes of Mauna Kea chasing birds. This meant walking across wide lava fields at about 2500 metres (7500 feet) to get into the native forest where the rare endemic birds ply their trade. We certainly saw some rare birds, but I was most impressed by the discovery that  the lava fields around the forest were entirely covered in a fuzzy layer of a grey lichen called Stereocaulon.  I could hardly believe that all this tumbled lava was essentially invisible under its coat of lichen. Ferns are also early colonizers..
Life abounds in the most unlikely places, as the pictures show..

Bloggus Maximus

LUCK, MAGIC OR SCIENCE - LIFE CHOICES

If you are reasonably smart, you can't go through 76 years, as I have, and not pick up a few wrinkles (both physical and mental). Ahem. So if you can bear to read this long blog, you may learn something useful. I was originally asked by the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Federation of Biological Societies to put these ideas together, so here goes.

Sooner or later, we all have to try and organize our lives, much as we may hate the idea. I can already hear you saying, "I don't want to think about any of that. I'm not ready to make decisions about anything much. I just want to have a good time. Oh, and I need to pass my mid-term."

But in fact you make lots of decisions. Whether to get up in the morning; what to eat for breakfast; whether to go to school (or work) or not (I'm joking). As far as I am concerned, day-to-day life has three essential components. All you have to do is choose how much time to spend on each.

The first is work: most of us feel that we have to do something to justify our existence, or at least to put food on the table. Your job at school is to learn the stuff you'll need to know later on.

The second component, you'll be glad to hear, is play: we all have a right to some relaxation; time when we don't worry about the future, and just let it all hang out (if that phrase is still being used).

The third component may be one some of you haven't thought about yet: I wasn't quite sure what to call it, but I eventually chose the word volunteering. It deals with your involvement in society. Doing things because they need to be done. Helping someone learn to read. Visiting lonely old people. Raising money for a charity. Cleaning up a stream. Defending the environment (that's my main form of social activism). Thinking about something or someone other than ourselves, for a change. Of course, you can choose not to volunteer, but I can promise you that if you do get involved, you will feel good about it. And it looks really terrific on your resumé when you apply for a job or a scholarship. I was a member of the committee that decided who would get the prestigious 1967 NSERC Scholarships, which were worth a cool $60,000 to students going for a higher degree. We travelled all over Canada to interview the candidates, and apart from brilliance, and 90% averages, our most important criterion was volunteer service.

John Kennedy wasn't as great a U.S. President as people liked to think: he screwed around a lot, something I doubt very much he'd be allowed to get away with today. But he did say a few good things. "Don't ask what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country."

We certainly need that kind of thinking today if our country is to survive into the next century.

We human beings are different from all other living organisms in having the power of choice. We can also imagine the future, and may even have some ideas about the meaning of life, the universe and all that. We make our first stabs at planning the future quite early. When I was growing up, little boys often said they wanted to be firemen or bus drivers. Girls often said they wanted to be mothers or nurses. We now know that these ideas were not generated by the kids themselves, but were absorbed from the people around them, and we now reject this kind of stereotyping by sex. All of you, male or female, can do anything you want to, if you set your minds to it. But most of our childish dreams never come true, and perhaps it's just as well, considering how little kids know about what a jungle it is out there, and how much more choice exists than children are aware of.

But as you grow up, you eventually come face to face with the big question: What am I really going to do with my life? How can I decide? Many of you are not yet ready to make that decision, so I'll bring the discussion down a level or two, and ask: How do you run your life on a day-to-day basis? Are you ruled by impulse? Do you look to someone else to make your decisions for you? Do you just follow the group? Or do you analyze situations and make your own decisions? Most of us are not very consistent: our answer would probably be: "All of the above." But what you do today gives hints about what you will do down the road.

I'm going to examine several possible ways in which we can make the big decisions. In the long run, it is extremely dangerous to avoid these decisions, because if we don't make them, they will be made for us. Which brings me to my title. If I examine their behaviour, most people seem to adopt one of three philosophies. The first group trust to luck: they seem to think that the world operates like a lottery, and they don't have any hope of controlling their own destiny. The second group run their lives according to a set of strict rules established by other people; rules that provide them with prescribed responses to all situations, and answers to all questions; rules that relieve them of the need to make any difficult or complex decisions. The third group look at as many angles as they can find, sift the evidence carefully, then make informed decisions based on their experience. As far as I am concerned, this last is the only possible course: it means taking charge of your life, and taking responsibility for your actions. Unfortunately, it is also by far the hardest course to follow.

You'd be surprised to find out how many people shrug their shoulders and play the numbers game. You probably know someone who goes to Las Vegas, Reno or Lake Tahoe to visit the casinos. If they are lucky, they will win a lot of money. A few do. Most don't. Usually, they lose (How could the casinos keep going if everybody won?) Others pin their hopes on horses, or on lotteries.

These are often people who feel that life has not treated them well, and that only Lady Luck can instantly transform their existence. They have essentially given up trying to get a life for themselves, and have decided to gamble. Against all the odds they expect the big win to happen any time now. Or do they? I would call it a forlorn hope. Do you know people who regularly buy lottery tickets? Do you personally know anyone who has won a lot of money? For every one who does win, there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of disappointed ticket buyers.

The odds against your winning the lottery by buying a single ticket are enormous, and last week's loss doesn't increase your chances of winning this week. Let's look at a few figures. Statistically, you are more likely to survive playing Russian roulette and pulling the trigger 88 times in succession. You are more likely to live to be 115 years old. You are much more likely to be killed in an automobile accident. If you buy one ticket a week, you are likely to win one jackpot every 1,846,000 years. Even the Blue Jays are more likely to win the World Series. In fact, lotteries are a gigantic scam: a way of bamboozling the poor into throwing away some of what little money they have.

But, you say, somebody has to win. Yes, but keep in mind that it's not likely to be you. So don't waste precious time sitting around waiting for luck to take care of you. That's fantasyland, although I know it can look attractive, especially in the face of the real world disappointments you will all inevitably suffer. Just remember that if you don't decide which way your life should go, you are effectively handing yourself over to chance, and the odds will not be in your favour.

Early humans had not yet figured any of this out: they hadn't invented statistics yet. But life was very hard, and they felt they had to do something that would at least give them a feeling of being in charge. So they invented all kinds of magic rituals they thought might help them to control what happened to them. If someone invented rituals like these today, we would call them neurotic and obsessive/compulsive, and we'd probably stay away from them. But back then psychology hadn't been invented either. They eventually decided that something outside themselves was in charge  some Supernatural Being. And since so many bad things happened to them, they assumed that this Being had a pretty nasty disposition. Perhaps the way to keep ahead of the game was to somehow sweeten the Being up.

But how to do it, since you couldn't see the Being or speak directly to it? Someone hit upon the idea of offering to the Being something they wanted themselves. Food has always been important to people, so they decided to offer the Being some really good roast lamb. We call these offerings sacrifices, and they really were sacrifices to our ancestors. Even today, I would find it hard to give up a leg of lamb and watch it burned black so the flavour could go up in the smoke to the Being. Well, despite increasingly desperate kinds of sacrifice, including things they valued even more highly than food, such as gold, and even young men and maidens, early people somehow failed to get on top of things. We know that they still lived in caves or mud huts or tents; they were often hungry; and they didn't live very long. Most people still died before they were thirty years old, and a fairly high percentage died in infancy. And even societies that managed to build large pyramids on which to sacrifice people eventually collapsed.

Inventing Supernatural Beings, and making sacrifices or offerings to them, became a large industry. It was a second way of organizing your life, and of avoiding the need to make your own decisions. And as far as I can see, it didn't work much better than the numbers game, except in one way. The rituals provided a way of binding people together into a group with common goals: they gave you a nice way of fitting in, and perhaps because of this, they still thrive today. A cult will say to you, "Give us all your money and all your stuff and we will look after you. All you have to do is follow our rituals for the rest of your life, and give up thinking for yourself." To someone who has lost control of their life to drugs, or who has suffered a personal tragedy, or who just feels lost, lonely and unloved, this offer can seem quite attractive. But I think it is an extremely dangerous thing to do, because you are essentially putting the best part of your brain in cold storage.

In fact, over the course of history, it is sadly true that most humans have turned over control of their lives to sets of rules originally devised, so they have been told, by one or more Supernatural Beings. These rules were intended to make life more pleasant and predictable. In some ways they did, but only if everyone around you followed the same set of rules. At least you knew what to expect from your neighbours.

But different groups of people somehow acquired different Supernatural Beings, and different sets of rules. Perhaps the most amazing thing about each set of rules was that it claimed to be the only correct one. This always implied that everyone who didn't accept your set was automatically wrong. People who used one set were often intolerant of people who used any other set. This intolerance sometimes ripened into jealousy or hatred, and led some groups to attack and kill or enslave other groups. Now I'm not suggesting that these people invented war, which often has to do with power rather than ideology, but they certainly made it popular. Sadly, it is still popular, thousands of years later, for the same reasons, and is just as stupid as it always was.

The wish to avoid responsibility for their own actions is so strong that many people will believe in almost anything, as long as someone else does it or says it first. Some believe that the positions of the stars and planets on the day of their birth control the rest of their lives. I have a lot of trouble with this one. Stars and planets are very large but almost unimaginably distant physical objects: They are, as far as we can yet tell, inanimate: no more than hunks of matter moving through space in a highly predictable way. It is difficult for scientists to imagine any way in which they could possibly affect the lives of different people in different ways, unless of course those people had decided to use them as scapegoats, as substitutes for rational decision-making. Never confuse the mumbo-jumbo of astrology with the science of astronomy. Mrs. Reagan apparently believed in astrology, and as we all know, she was the power behind the President; that confirms my worst suspicions about the way the U.S.A. was being run. Shakespeare said it best: The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

As children we are told endless stories in which magic gets the hero or heroine out of trouble. But of course magic is just wishful thinking. If only we could fly over the rainbow. If only we could turn lead into gold, as the alchemists dreamed of doing. If only we could all be young and rich and beautiful, and live happily ever after. But although we can amuse ourselves with such ideas during the playtimes of our lives, the real world just ain't like that.

Despite their magic, early people still lived in caves and died young. But we don't. And the reason we don't is not that our parents won a lottery, or that they cast a particularly good spell, or that some fatherly or motherly Supernatural Being gave them their wish. No, the reason we live as well as we do, and as long as we do, and know as much as we do about the world around us and the universe beyond, is because we invented a simple technique called the scientific method.

That's the secret, in three words: the scientific method.

How does it work? In essentials, it is amazingly simple.

Step 1. You begin by doing something everyone has done since the beginning of the human race. You observe, you look at things. But you don't look at them casually. You choose one set of things to look at, and you make notes, you analyze what you are seeing. As Charles Darwin sailed around South America on the Beagle, he could have acted as millions of tourists still do: he could have treated it all as a passing show. But he didn't. He observed and he recorded. His brain was in gear. He saw things many people had seen, yet he thought what no-one had thought. That's one secret of being a good scientist.

In step 2, you bring a lot of observations together, pick out some common feature that catches your interest, and try to put together an explanation. This preliminary explanation is called a hypothesis, which is a fancy word for an educated guess.

Step 3 involves using the hypothesis to predict something we don't yet know.

Having made the prediction, we test it by making more observations or doing some experiments.

If we find that some of the results don't fit our hypothesis, it has to go. That's Step 4.

Most hypotheses turn out to be wrong. Remarkably few hypotheses last for ten years before they are disproved. Very few indeed last for 100 years. But that is perfectly all right. Science advances largely by disproving hypotheses. Abandoning ideas that don't work. A simple concept, but not a popular one, even among scientists. It's hard to see your cherished brainchild go in the trash, but if it fails the test, that's exactly where it has to go.

The whole process is cyclical, because scientists think up new hypotheses to replace the old ones on a regular basis. Each new one explains our observations better than the last, but each in turn is generally doomed to be replaced by another. We never reach finality or truth. The answer is not 42. But we learn. How we learn! We learn what electricity is, and how to do a million things with it. We learn about the chemical elements, and how they can be combined in millions of different ways to make most of the things we see around us. We learn what causes diseases, and how to prevent or cure them. Almost all of what we know about the world around us, and the universe beyond, we have learned by applying the scientific method. And we have learned it all in only a few hundred years.

It is almost unbelievable that such a simple method should produce such far-reaching results. Yet

they are all around us. We had no proper anaesthetics until the 19th century, no antibiotics or atom bombs until 50 years ago. No appropriate immuno-suppressants until 20 years ago. Widespread organ transplantation only during the past two decades. No personal computers, and no compact VCRs or videocameras until the 1980's. Life has changed beyond recognition during the last 200 years  even during the past 50 years, while I have been watching  and despite the confusion of incessant change, not many of us would like to go back to an era when we lit our houses with candles or oil lamps, heated them with wood stoves, drew water at the well, travelled on foot or in horse-drawn buggies, had no movies or T/V, and died at an early age of TB, diphtheria, polio, septicaemia, smallpox and many other diseases we have almost forgotten about, and you may never have heard of.

I have a houseplant. One day I notice that it has died. I could call it an Act of God (this is a phrase insurance companies use to cover destructive events they can't explain, and don't want to pay for). If that hypothesis is what I really believe, it can't be tested, and that's the end of it. But I may prefer not to accept this ready-made answer, and I hypothesize that the plant died because I forgot to water it. I have come up with a testable hypothesis, and I'm going to test it. I predict that if I water a plant of this kind only once a week, then it will die. So I set up an experiment. I go back to the nursery and buy three more plants, making sure they tell me the Latin name of the plant. Why do I do that? Because it will allow me to look in a library or a computer database, or on Google to learn what other people have already found out about this species and its requirements. I make sure that the new plants are in the same kind of pot, and get the same lighting in the same place in the house. These precautions are an attempt to reduce the number of variables to one: water. Then I proceed to water the first plant every day, the second plant every other day, and the third plant only once a week. I am doing an experiment.

All three plants die. This sounds bad, but it isn't a total loss: I have disproved my watering hypothesis, and must look for another one. I wonder about the possible effects of temperature and light, and mineral nutrients, or of diseases. And I design experiments to explore these effects. At this point I have run out of money, and will probably apply for a grant. More plants arrive. Some live, some die. And I gradually learn just what conditions will kill my plant. Even more important, I learn how to keep it alive, and how to make it grow. The answers may not matter to anyone but me. But it is also possible that I have learned something that will be useful to people who are trying to figure out how to raise crops in Ethiopia, where it may be a matter of life or death. Science is full of stories about people who were curious about strange and apparently irrelevant phenomena, yet ended up by discovering things that changed the world. But those stories belong to another blog.

A scientist sees something and it triggers her curiosity. Yes, there are more and more women scientists, and we need them all. Scientists, male and female, are always asking questions. Always wondering why things are the way they are. And finding out.

I have been a scientist of sorts for over 50 years. I have asked far more questions than I have been able to answer. And each answer I and my graduate students have reached has raised many new questions. There is lots of work for scientists to do. But being a scientist has given me an interesting life. I have been able to follow my own curiosity in many different directions, and have always had a lot of control over what I do.

If you want to be a poet, I suspect that the scientific method is not for you. I must admit that the rather rigorous logic and the analytical approach of science seems to have stifled any poet there may have been in me. But science has opened even my eyes to the magnificence of the world about us. I have experienced the wonderful diversity of tropical rain forests, and been SCUBA diving on the world's finest coral reefs. I have found a hundred species of beautiful plants hiding in a dull, flat prairie, and as many fascinating microscopic fungi in a handful of soil. And as I have travelled around the world, I have been rudely awakened to the way that our species is thoughtlessly destroying the habitats of millions of living things; complex, highly evolved organisms which have just as much right to be here as we do.

Science is a powerful weapon, but it is two-edged. By inventing death-control, it extended our life-spans, but also triggered our disastrous population explosion. Science spawned the technology that enables us to lead stimulating and fulfilling lives, but also turns the richness and beauty of our old-growth forests into bare hillsides and last week's newspapers. Science itself may be amoral, but remember that it is scientists who are warning that we have already overpopulated the planet, and who point out that we are now greedily engaged in exploiting and wrecking the very ecosystems that support us. We can only hope that enough of you will join us, and join us in time, to save the world.

Of course, you can't all be scientists, and I'm sure a lot of you wouldn't want to be. And science can't solve all your problems: the scientific method isn't suitable for dealing with political, psychological, ethical and theological problems, to name a few. But you can all learn something from the successes of science. Don't play the numbers game. Don't rely on luck. It won't save you or the Earth. Don't let anyone persuade you that ritual should rule your life; that would mean you had given up, tuned out, turned off. Look carefully at all your options, then use your minds to make rational choices. You will encounter many problems: we all do. I hope you will try to solve them rather than avoid them. 

January 27, 2010

**Bryce wrote this and I feel this almost as amazing as spending actual time with him! I hope you enjoy it cause I know I do! Thoughts of a genius here...** cambria

Sixteen ways to appear cultivated/educated/literate
without pulling all-nighters...

I taught various aspects of Biology at the University of Waterloo for almost 30 years. So I had plenty of time to discover that most of my students were far worse at English than they were at Biology, and I put a rather disproportionate amount of time and energy into teaching them the rudiments of what was in most cases their mother tongue.
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When I got them to write an essay in my third or fourth year classes, they always complained that they had never had to do this before. I responded that this had been a bad thing, because if they wanted to make a positive impression in their future jobs they would need to speak and write clearly.

What I am about to impart to you now are some of the fruits of my struggles with undergraduate illiteracy. If you can deal correctly with the things I am about to discuss, your superiors will note this with approbation.

First, the spoken word. The substitution of the ŒF word‚ for virtually all other adjectives and verbs definitely conveys a certain impression (see ŒTrailer Park Boys‚). But most people betray themselves rather more subtly, and the great thing is that this problem can be overcome with relative ease.

(1) If you pronounce the word Œnuclear‚ as Œnucular‚ you are putting yourself in the same category as Dubya Bush, and not many of us would want to do that, would we?

(2) ŒHow are you?‚ ŒGood‚ is a common but incorrect reply. What should you say? ŒWell, thank you.‚ Remember the old saying about the Pilgrim Fathers who Œcame to North America to do good, and stayed to do well‚. Good is an adjective (a word that describes a noun) ŒA good man‚. Well is an adverb (a word that qualifies a verb). ŒHe did well‚. Of course, well has another meaning, as in ŒWell, he was a good man, but he done (did) her wrong‚.

(3) The frequent confusion of Œlie‚ and Œlying‚ with Œlay‚ and Œlaying‚ is unfortunate, since they mean different things. ŒShe was laying on the bed‚ implies egg production, though to say ŒShe lay on the bed‚ (past tense) is just fine, and no form of reproduction is necessarily implied (though the possibilities are clearly endless). The rules here are a little convoluted, and have to be learned by rote, since the structure of the language is not internally consistent or logical. Irregular verbs (lie, be, come, go) are sent to try us. Interestingly, languages other than English also have irregular (inconsistent) verbs, so the mental quirk/gene involved in their invention and adoption must be widespread.

(4) The Œfewer‚ - Œless‚ problem. Here‚s an easy rule: fewer refers to number, less refers to quantity.
ŒThere are fewer (not less) wasps around this year.‚  Most people get the less right for quantity, as in ŒI have less money than I would like‚. But they tend to use Œless‚ where Œfewer‚ would be correct ŒThere are less (fewer) students at the school this year‚.   

(5) A good rule is to expunge the word Œlike‚ from your vocabulary. If you can avoid it altogether, despite its being a useful word in some contexts, then it won‚t creep unnoticed into inappropriate places. It‚s, like, a real giveaway. If you like ice cream and want to say so, you can replace the word with a stronger one, such as Œlove‚, Œmust have‚, Œcrave‚, or Œscream for‚.

But most of the gaffes are committed in writing (which is where I encountered them). Some of the words involved are Œhomophones‚: that is, two words which sound the same while being spelled differently.

(6) So if you write ŒThe Principle of my school was a real scumbag‚ you are revealing, not just that you didn‚t like the guy, but that you don‚t know the difference between the wordsprinciple and principal. Of course, in England, where I grew up, we avoided this issue by calling him the Headmaster, as in ŒThe Headmaster of my school was a real (insert desired noun)‚.

(7) If you write ŒShe poured over [studied] the documents for hours‚ you are displaying an unfamiliarity with the word Œpored‚.

(8) The number of people who confuse Œtheir‚ and Œthere‚ is legion (but surely I don‚t have to give examples ...). And there‚s another problem associated with the word Œthere‚. It is frequently added to the beginning of a sentence, where it is completely unnecessary. ŒThere were seventy different species of mushroom found in the woods‚. What‚s wrong with the unadorned ŒSeventy species of mushroom were found in the woods‚?

(9) and (10) Other bad beginnings are: ŒBased on‚ and ŒDue to‚.   This is because those two phrases need something in front of them, explaining what is Œbased on‚, and what is Œdue to‚.
ŒOur conclusions were based on a series of experiments‚ is fine.
ŒThe school was closed due to an outbreak of Œflu‚. is OK. (The closure was occasioned by the Œflu).
I personally try to avoid both of these phrases because it is far too easy to misapply them.
Why not ŒHis results were derived from...‚ and ŒThe school was closed because of an outbreak...‚

(11) Here‚s one I read in the paper this morning. ŒAt age 12, the horse she was riding spooked...‚
What that sentence actually says is that the horse was 12. What it was just as clearly meant to say was that the rider was 12. This error is so common as to persuade me that many people never read over what they write in order to check whether they said what they wanted to say, or something else altogether...It‚s called proof-reading, and it‚s perfectly obvious that even the best newspapers don‚t do it any more.

(12) ŒYou and I‚ or ŒYou and me‚. Which is correct? The answer is that both can be correct, in the right place. ŒYou and I‚ belongs at the beginning of a sentence. ŒYou and me‚ belongs further in or at the end. The key is to think about whether ŒI‚ or Œme‚ is appropriate.
Œ[You and] I will go to the movies‚.
ŒIt would be better for [you and] me to go‚

(13) The number of signs that advertise something as happening Œtonite‚ (tonight) is alarming, as is the number touting Œlite‚ (light) beer.  This raises a different issue - whether phonetic spelling is a good thing.  That`s for another time.

(14) The misuse of the apostrophe is epidemic - far more so than SARS or West Nile will ever be. It‚s is the most abused word in the language. Since it means Œit is‚ or Œit has‚, it is absolutely inappropriate when used in the sentence ŒThe CBC is celebrating it‚s 50th Anniversary.‚ Not that the CBC would ever advertise itself thus (I tell myself).
It‚s my belief that we have lost this one, and that the best thing would be to do away with the apostrophe altogether, leaving the context to make the meaning clear. George Bernard Shaw, who held opinions on many subjects, tended not to use apostrophes in his writings, and I have to say that when I read his plays I have little trouble understanding his meaning. I was not lead astray (sorry, I mean led).

(15) If only people knew where to put the word only. The following three sentences mean very different things.
I only saw her this morning (I didn‚t talk to her).
I saw only her this morning. (I didn‚t see anyone else this morning).
I saw her only this morning. (I saw her very recently).
Think about it. It is clear that where that word goes is crucial, because the entire sense of the sentence rests upon it.

(16) You have to reach a certain level of linguistic skill before you will use the word Œdisinterested‚ in any context, but you should know that it means Œimpartial or unbiased‚ and that it can never be construed to mean Œuninterested.‚, though it is often used as if that was what it meant. This sin is widespread, and causes concern/distress/depression in the ranks of language lovers..

And that's the end of one heavy blog - and not even one picture to lighten it up!