This article was adapted from the new book
"Wasted World," from University of Chicago Press.
Ring a ring o’ roses, A pocketful of posies. A-tishoo! A-tishoo! We all fall down.
For this happy English nursery rhyme, children hold hands to form a circle, and then dance around, singing. Nice for a birthday party. At the end, they all fall down, laughing. However, many people believe this happy, innocent little song easily remembered by young children refers to the dreaded plague that killed hundreds of thousands all over Europe; at times, two-thirds of a community would perish. The “A-tishoo! A-tishoo!” may refer to the sneezing during the pneumonic phase of the disease that can develop after the initial, bubonic phase, known for its feared red spots and boils. The first phase alone led to tens—even hundreds—of thousands suffering an awful death. The frightening, painful deaths of the plague victims in the Middle Ages and in subsequent epidemics (notably the one in London in 1665) soon disappeared from the collective memory.
The worldwide wave of concern caused by the book “The Limits to Growth,” a mere forty years ago, wherein the Club of Rome warned that our earthly resources are limited, seems to have suffered the same fate. It was soon forgotten. But if that concern was justified, by pushing it out of our mind, haven’t we lost much valuable time that could have been used to tackle the problem? The Club of Rome’s warning in 1972 did not have the immediate consequences of the plague; its consequences are longer term and will be felt by future generations, but they will have a much larger impact: the suffering and death of hundreds of millions of people. Of billions perhaps. What have we been doing since 1972? How can we have forgotten? Instead of reducing our numbers and resource use, we have stimulated them—deliberately. Since the 1970s, our reproductive rates have reached unprecedented heights, and per capita consumption has multiplied, particularly in the West. During the last ten thousand years, our numbers, demands, and reproductive rates have never been so high. Who worries?
We are now entering the second wave of concern about resource limitations, one to which concerns about energy supply and climate warming have been added. Other concerns haven’t penetrated the media that deeply yet, and discussing the increase in our numbers seems to be a taboo subject that has met with resistance. Meanwhile, the tone of the debate is more positive and optimistic than it was during the 1970s. For example, worldwide, ways of reducing the amount of carbon dioxide expelled into the air to fight climate warming are widely being discussed: how this can be done by more economical energy use, by replanting forests, or by burying the carbon dioxide. And we seem satisfied by the forecasts that our numbers will stabilize around 2050, not realizing that our resource use and its consequent waste production are not connected into a perfect cycle, but are linear. Stabilizing the world’s population while maintaining resource use at such an incredibly high level cannot but lead to rapid exhaustion and overpollution. We are getting closer and closer to those limits, and during the last thirty years the network of interactions has tightened into a fyke. Our higher numbers and demands give us less time to maneuver away from disaster.
In “The Limits to Growth,” Dennis Meadows and others concluded from one calculation that the number of humans could crash suddenly rather than stabilize gradually. But none of the other calculations showed this effect; their results suggested that the numbers of humans on Earth had to be reduced gradually, and with them, the overuse of natural resources. It seemed that this single result was anomalous and could be ignored, although its cause remained unclear.
Twenty years later, however, in their 1992 follow-up book “Beyond the Limits,” on the basis of calculations using data from the intermediate years, the authors reported that such crashes were no longer exceptional but had become the rule. Results without a population crash had become exceptional; crashes appeared to be normal and seemed not easily avoidable. This was a very different story. Without knowing the underlying causes, population crashes were now being attributed to delays in the fine tuning of interactions within the system and to the exceeding of limits of irreversible degradation.
But why a crash instead of a slower slide? What had changed in those twenty years? It remains difficult to understand. There are some known processes that produce such results and that can operate in concert, enhancing their effects.
Here’s a riddle: a pondweed like duckweed is assumed to grow in a pond, doubling its surface cover in a single day. As the surface area of the pond is finite, the duckweed can cover it completely in thirty days. So, how much of the pond has the duckweed covered by, say, the twenty-seventh day? The answer is astonishingly low: 12.5 percent. Hardly anything. Yet it’s true. Most people find it difficult to do the calculation, although the difficulty lies not in the calculation itself, but rather, in three ways of thinking that are unfamiliar. First, it is often difficult to calculate backward. It is easy to calculate the plant cover on day one, then on day two, and so on. That’s how we learned to solve such problems at school. In this case, however, you start by calculating the plant cover on day twenty-nine, which is 50 percent of the total cover on day thirty, then use that figure to calculate the cover on day twenty-eight, which is half of 50 percent, or 25 percent, and then do this again for day twenty- seven, which gives the 12.5 percent. Not difficult at all—just unfamiliar.
Second, growth is usually assumed to continue indefinitely, whereas in this case there is a definite end: the 100 percent cover of the pond. The growth process, therefore, is limited, just like our resources (the amount of forest, metals, and energy) are limited, or like the amount of waste we can dump into the environment. By contrast, there is no maximum temperature for Earth’s atmosphere. With enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, here on Earth it could become as hot as on Venus, where surface temperatures are 450°C. But like us, plants can tolerate temperatures only up to some point, beyond which they wilt and die. Neither plants nor humans could live on Venus. The same holds for the amount of waste the environment can tolerate before it becomes irretrievably polluted for plants or animals; we all know that there is some such threshold, but we don’t know how far pollution can proceed—we don’t know its limits.
Finally, we are not used to thinking in terms of doubling or tripling times. That is, most of us are not used to thinking in terms of exponential growth or reduction. We can add and subtract, and we can multiply once but not several times by the same number, which is what you do when calculating exponential growth. Moreover, from personal experience, we know that a family grows by adding children: one, two, or three. But when calculated over a population, later these children have families of their own and so the process changes from an additive to a multiplicative process, resulting in exponential growth. An average of three children per family produces a total of nine children in the next generation, then twenty seven in the third. This change in thinking from a concrete additive process to the abstract one of exponential growth can be difficult. But thinking in terms of exponential growth is essential in order to be able to understand many of the processes of resource use, the growth of industries, the spread of diseases, and the complexification of society.
We don’t know how or when such a crash develops, in what corner the problem will arise, or how fast it will go. It may be triggered by some minor problem, the effects of which amplify, pulling other sectors of society down, thereby rapidly, exponentially worsening the growing disaster. The only thing we do know is that many trends in society point in the wrong direction, making it increasingly more prone to collapse, such as our growing numbers and demands, the declining biodiversity, climate change, and the rapid depletion of sources of energy, nutrients, and water. What makes this worse is that we increasingly depend on an economy based on growth, growth considered both the cause and the cure of our problems. And we know that all of these trends are interdependent. For example, sustaining our growing numbers and demands depends on a regular and unlimited supply of energy—a supply that, nevertheless, is limited. Approaching its limits means that we need to develop ever more efficient technology to squeeze out the last remains of the fossil fuels from Earth, which, in turn, depends on ever larger investments. However, investors want to see their money back, which proves increasingly more difficult the closer we get to the point of depletion. They have to invest more and more, but as less fuel can be mined, the returns become less and less. Approaching the point of depletion, investors will gradually draw their money back in order to reinvest it into something more profitable: at this point, a positive feedback loop starts up; more and more investors withdraw their money, this loop destabilizing the societal system as a whole. Energy shortage will destabilize this system because energy is the main constituent of our body, our numbers, requirements, and infrastructural organization.
In fact, the decreasing trend in the energy returns on investment was already apparent in the early 1990s, a trend which continues to the present day and which may develop into the feared financial and economic positive feedback loop. Food will be more expensive to produce, leaving the poor in jeopardy. And so on. Similar trends in other basic requirements either occur already or are imminent. Because energy shortages may tighten, they can therefore also develop in the supply of nutrients or water; and the extraction, recycling, or desalination of seawater will require increasing amounts of energy. And this, in turn, can push us faster in the direction of energy depletion, and into that of the positive feedback loop of lesser energy returns on investment. And so forth. We know the trends, we know where they will lead and how, but we don’t know which of them will trigger the others to join into the one positive loop or the other, and when.
Most of us know from school how markets work; we learned the simple, two-factor systems of supply and demand. According to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the late eighteenth century, prices will balance each other. In such systems, supply and demand balance each other through the price asked for a product. A greater supply leads to lower prices, which increases the demand. Greater demand, in turn, increases the price, which, again, increases the supply, which brings us back to the first step, a lowering of the prices. This results in an endless, wave-like process, undulating into eternity. The same idea can be found in ecology where two competing species or a predator and its prey would similarly balance each other; or in selection theory, where two parties would compete, although here the fittest eventually wins.
And in James Lovelock’s Daisyworld, over geological time producers and users of carbon dioxide would cause climate to fluctuate regularly around one stable level. In fact, the occurrence of a stable level is basic to the concept of carrying capacity, where abundances are also assumed to fluctuate around a certain stable level. This would also happen to the human population after 2050, when it is presumed to remain stable at the level of nine or ten billion people. All these concepts consider short-term or local dynamics underlying a long-term or global stability, never a collapse of the system. Such systems would be in equilibrium, or could even have two equilibriums at different levels from which it is difficult to escape. Fish stocks, for example, could switch to a lower equilibrium level after having been overfished for some time. It would then be almost impossible to switch back to the previous, higher level.
Although these processes do occur, reality is usually more unruly and complex. Usually, there are more than two system components interacting, and this is a point where the real problems arise. We can derive mathematical equations for the dynamics of two-component systems, but this is theoretically impossible for systems consisting of three components or more, such as in economic ones in human society, in ecologic ones in nature, or among the few planets rotating around the sun.
Because they are much of a jumble as well, societies can crash or collapse. Such crashes not only develop rapidly, but their cause, course, and timing are unpredictable. Mathematicians call this field of study deterministic chaos: unpredictability reigns, even when nothing happens by chance; chance within the process only gives additional unpredictability. Imagine, therefore, what happens when such systems contain an element of chance as well.
So, how does chance work, and does chance depend on the number of people making up society and its complexity? If so, does the chance of societal collapse increase over time as our numbers and their resulting societal complexity grow? Have our living conditions changed (gradual soil salination, or a sudden rise in the price of food due to drought in Australia or Russia, for example)?
Think for a moment of a die: what is the chance of throwing, say, a five? A die has six sides, each with the same chance of turning up. The chance of throwing a five is one in six, or 17 percent. Conversely, the combined chance of throwing any number other than five is five in six, or 83 percent. But how great is the chance of getting a five within two consecutive throws? That chance is obviously twice as large, or 33 percent, and the chance of getting any other number is 67 percent. Therefore, the more throws, the greater the chance of getting your preferred five at least once. And the chance of missing it reduces accordingly. The same reasoning applies to, say, the chance of some explosion happening in an oil pipe, though in this case you are interested in the chance of the event not happening. Now the chance that some disaster will not happen is made as small as possible, say, one in 10,000, and the chance of an explosion occurring is only one in 9,999. Obviously, these chances also depend on the length of the pipe, on the number of pipes, on the number of welds, or the number of pumping and control stations, that is, on the complexity of the pipe system, and also on the length of the period the system is operating: the longer the pipes and the more there are, the greater the complexity of the system they form and the longer the period of operation, the greater the chance of something going wrong, resulting in an explosion.
Moreover, all these mistakes and disasters have different chances of happening, and all these chances are superimposed. You can try out for yourself what happens by throwing different kinds of dice, the normal one with six sides, then one with four, eight, ten, twelve, twenty, and one with thirty sides. The result is a very wiggly line when you add the outcomes of these sets of dice for a number of throws together for each point on this line. Each new point is different from any of the previous ones and therefore is impossible to predict; it was already impossible to predict the outcome of one single die. Still, this curve resembles the real world in many respects where also many chance events occur, the one adding to another and each with a different chance of happening.
In reality, the chances have different and varying weights relative to the total process as well, and they interact both linearly and nonlinearly, which we all kept constant and independent when we threw our seven sets of dice. How can we predict the future of society but in general terms of depletion and pollution rates? These are our certainties, but we really can’t predict in detail what will happen and when as a social or economic result. For these societal effects we can only say that the chance of collapse increases with an increasing complexity of society, as well as with increasing stress from resource depletion, pollution, and social inequality.
Think of the decline of ancient Rome, which took centuries; nobody knows why it declined; we have more explanations than authors. Because of the great influence of chance in all aspects of society, whose behavior is unknowable and, hence, unpredictable—manageable only up to some point, after which further developments grow out of hand. Why the reason for a crash such as the decline of Rome is also unknowable, and why its crash was unmanageable, is that people usually look at only one process in isolation, such as the invasion of the Gothic tribes or the general poisoning of people by lead in the water pipes. In many cases, however, a disaster is triggered by the coinciding of a number of different events or processes, not by a single event or process. Therefore, as our numbers continue to grow exponentially, the size and complexity of society increases exponentially relative to those numbers. Consequently, the predictability of a particular crash developing from the occurrence of a certain combination of chance events or processes decreases.
Moreover, because many factors can be interdependent, a crash in one sector pulls others in its wake, making it a general crash in no time and also making it more difficult to manipulate or manage. Crashes of our socioeconomic system will therefore become more frequent and less easy to control.
I think that the collapse of the present human population, its numbers and quality of life, is likely, and also that the most humane way to weather this period is to design a strategy and follow it ourselves rather than sit back and wait complacently. Unfortunately, the time for old customs and cultural traditions or of long-held beliefs and trusts is over. As the latest calculations from 1992 by Meadows and colleagues in “Beyond the Limits“ showed, our world can collapse, and this can happen even before any resource has definitively been depleted; collapse may come at any time and out of nowhere. It’s an inevitable, unavoidable result of the behavior of an oversized, complex, nonlinear system in which interdependent chance processes dominate.
The wave of large-scale deregulations because of the globalization of the last thirty years have only made this worse by allowing more positive feedback loops into the system. Nobody knows exactly how likely it is that our societal system will collapse or when. We know that this is theoretically inescapable, because all the local and national infrastructures and the global superstructure are based on abstractions. Moreover, system collapse follows from almost any simulation experiment based on relatively recent data—data that are now already twenty years old and are therefore too optimistic. In those twenty years, it has become even more likely that the conditions theoretically leading to system collapse will occur.
Excerpted with permission from “Wasted World: How Our Consumption Challenges the Planet.” Copyright: 2012 University of Chicago Press.
You walk into an elevator and push the button for your desired floor. The button lights up. The elevator stops at the next floor and another person enters. He or she pushes the same button that’s already lit up.
According to Dario Maestripieri’s new book, “Games Primates Play,” that elevator ride represents a game of dominance — similar to those exhibited by other primates. The University of Chicago professor argues that our social relationships have analogs in nature, especially within groups of primates. While we may not go up and grab our supervisor’s genitals as a sign of respect, we engage in similar acts that help us figure out where we fit in groups.
By exploring our social lives through the lens of an evolutionary biologist, Maestripieri breaks down the most routine of social interactions into deeply embedded behaviors from our genetic forebears. Just like humans, other primates grapple with questions of dominance, reciprocation, nepotism and fidelity. He demonstrates how his own life, the lives of celebrities, and corporate success strategies all derive from a single, primal need to find our place in a group.
Salon spoke with Maestripieri about the primal instincts we exhibit in our emails, whether altruism exists, how nepotism is natural, and why it matters to study our everyday nature.
Why are primates such good indicators for understanding human behavior?
Because humans are primates. We are closely related to them, so we are very similar in many things. Our anatomy, morphology, behavior — we also live in pretty similar environments. We’re confronted with most of the same problems, and sometimes we come up with the same solutions.
You call these “games,” but reading the book, with topics like establishing dominance, where a primate might just rip off another’s testicles, it all seems very serious. How are these considered games?
The title was inspired by the bestselling book from the 1960s called “Games People Play,” which was about human relationships, and the idea was that there are patterns that tend to recur in human relationships. It’s not true that every relationship is unique and different from all the others — there are underlying rules, and patterns, and things that recur. In my book I try to question what these patterns are, what are these rules that we use, where they come from, why they exist, and whether they’re good or bad for us. They’re not necessarily games in the traditional sense, but we tend to do these things like “tit for tat,” reciprocation, altruism, punishment — and there’s a lot of similarities to what a primate does, definitely some of the same patterns.
And sometimes they really are like a real game. I use game theory to explain the way we behave.
You talk about a whole world of competition that is done in the dark, how we’ll take advantage of others when we know we won’t get caught. Is there such a thing as altruism, or is that a fallacy?
We look at trends of behavior. I try to explain how, on average, people behave in certain situations. I don’t try to explain the behavior of all individuals. Every statement that scientists make is about the average behavior. Even during the 1977 blackout in New York City, there were people who were amazingly good and helpful and didn’t commit crimes. Still, a lot of people did. You can explain that on average, when it’s dark, when you can commit a crime and not get caught, more people have a tendency to commit crime. But not everyone. Altruism is the same thing. Many people behave altruistically without any compensation, without any reward or benefit. But, on average, more people are willing to commit a crime. Altruism becomes something that can be reciprocated if you use it to gain a reputation, something like that. It’s not random, and there are trends, but not everybody has to behave that way. Not everyone has to commit a crime.
How does this correspond to popular movements, like protests or upheavals?
I don’t know. There are other disciplines like sociology to explain things on that large scale. I’m not that interested in explaining mass movements. I’m more interested in discussing relationships. Primates do form complex societies, but they don’t organize themselves into movements like humans do.
Do we create these group structures — the office, the academy — because we’re part of this evolutionary chain of group-oriented animals?
We live in a society that is incredibly structured. It has very rigid dynamics, so that if you want to be successful, you can’t do it on your own. You have to make friends and protect yourself from the enemy. You’ll have family members help you. This is an integral part of human life. Imagine politics. You can’t be successful in politics unless you make friends, alliances, engage in games of reciprocation, of favors, like “You do this for me, I’ll do this for you.” It’s inevitable. Whenever we form groups, whether it’s teams or companies, dominance hierarchies will develop within each group because that’s human nature. When people are naturally competitive, they’ll be the dominators. I like to explain why it is that when you put people in a group, they immediately form a hierarchy. Why when you put two people together, one has to be dominant and one has to be subordinate. There can’t be a romantic relationship between two people where there’s no dominant one. It’s impossible. I’d like to challenge someone to show me how two people can be together and not have a dominance relationship where one is in charge and the other isn’t. I explain why dominance is such a pervasive part of human relationships.
You make an argument in favor of the naturalness of nepotism.
It’s natural. But the problem with human nepotism is that when it’s implemented, then rules are broken, laws are broken, and crimes are committed. So because we have a social charter and rules we’ve established that regulate our societies, nepotism can become criminal. The fact that something is natural doesn’t make it acceptable ethically, legally or socially. In nature, there is no morality. Nepotism just is. Nepotism exists in society, but we decide that it’s morally and legally wrong. So it becomes a big issue.
You use personal anecdotes to prove some of your points. When did you realize your life was something that mirrored the animals you studied? Has behavior always been a fascination?
It has been from the very beginning of my life. I became interested in studying animal behavior and evolutionary biology because I wanted to explain my own behavior, and the behavior of people around me, and when I began studying primates, I suddenly realized there were all these similarities.
There are all these other scientific approaches to the study of behavior, and I think they only explain general patterns, very broad trends. Why are young women attracted to older men with a lot of money? What men and women want, and what they do. But what I try to do in this book is show that you can explain scientifically even very fine details of behavior, of everyday situations. The way you act in an elevator, the way you act in the workplace, the way you act with your boss, at home with your partner, with your kids. You can have science explain even small details of everyday behavior. Things that trouble people can be explained by biology — which is one of my goals.
You write that you can look at someone’s emails and tell whether they’ll succeed or not, based on primate behavior. How much of our life is dictated by primal urges? Doesn’t self-awareness change everything?
“Dictated” is not the right word. The right word is “tendency.” We have tendencies, propensities, so whenever we confront particular problems, we have a tendency to act a certain way. One of the points I try to make is that human nature, our primal heritage, mostly appears in our social behavior. So there are things that humans do, like engaging in complex thought, abstract thinking, the arts, human morality — these are things we’re able to do because of our cognitive abilities. You can’t find parallels in the animal world. But when it comes to basic things, like being afraid of strangers, or being worried that your partner is going to cheat on you — these are problems that are not recent. Animals, especially primates, have been dealing with these problems for millions of years. We haven’t come up with any new solutions to these problems — any solutions that have worked, anyway. We have some preprogrammed tendencies to solve these problems. We could always choose not to solve them a certain way. People can choose whatever they want. But we’re being pushed in a certain direction by human nature.
How, by understanding “human nature,” can we improve our actions? Or are we just destined to do these things?
One thing that I always try to make very clear is that biology isn’t destiny. The fact that we have biological propensities to act a certain way doesn’t mean we have to do it that way. We can change our environment. We can choose to be whatever we want. Knowledge of these propensities is helpful. If you want to modify behavior, though, you have to understand it first. To be happy, you have to understand what it is that makes people happy and why people behave in certain ways.
If everything was random, there’d be no roles, and everything would be different. But there are roles; there are reasons why people behave the way they do. So understanding this behavior is very helpful.
You use a lot of examples from popular culture, of celebrities, to help explain some of your research. How is that helpful for explaining these concepts?
The lives of celebrities are very public. We can all relate to them. That’s why we’re so interested. We can always relate to the issues of marriage, and divorce, and having kids. Everybody knows about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. You can use science to explain why a friend of mine got divorced, but no one would know him. So obviously it makes sense to explain the behavior of people better known.
It seems like every facet of life is mirrored by the primates. What isn’t? What is original to humans? Was there some point where you said, “This is just something really weird that humans do.”
Of course! There’s a lot I left out. I focused on social behavior and relationships. I did a book on relationships, but they’re not everything. Humans might choose to live a solitary life where you have no relationships and still be a good human being. I don’t try to explain everything. People doing things that are intellectual, their art, people who sacrifice themselves — human life is very complex. I focus on human relationships. Relationships are a crucial part of our lives. As I explain in the book, one universal thing about human life is that you see some of the same people every day of your life. Whether it’s friends, co-workers, enemies, there are recurring problems. How do you make friends, how do you keep them, how do you find a partner, how do you keep in touch with relatives — these are the things I focus on. Evolutionary biology and economics can help explain them, because these problems are nothing new.
Because you’ve brought your study into the world of your own personal interactions, how has your awareness of the world changed? Do friends ask you to stop studying them when they’re just trying to have a pleasant conversation?
I’ve always been like this. I’ve always been curious about people’s behaviors. That’s why I entered the profession. Writing this book hasn’t changed the way I live my life, but I understand things much better than before. Everything can be studied. Behavior is a legitimate subject for scientific inquiry, just like everything else. Some people have issues with this idea because they feel that behavior is just a product of free will. The way you behave is the product of your conscious decisions. How can you explain scientifically what people do? They think behavior is arbitrary. But it isn’t! If you observe primates, you see there’s shared behavior across all different types of species. Behavior is fascinating because we’re all different, but at the same time, we’re not so different. So we like to think we’re different, but, not all that much.
Fish, without a doubt, gotta swim, but how do they do it? And how, over millenniums of evolution, did they get to be so good at it? These two questions have driven the career of John Long, a professor of biology and cognitive science at Vassar College. Long is so into fish that his primal scene of intellectual seduction involved a Ph.D. trying to get him to join her team by taking him out for coffee and asking, “Have you seen the vertebral column of a marlin?” Thus was Long launched into a course of study that would ultimately lead him to the improbable task of making robot fish.
As geeky as this may sound, it turns out that the problems inherent in making robot fish yield some of humanity’s deepest questions: How did we get here? What (and where) is thought? How much can we trust the symbols (words, images, digital signals) that dominate our lives? Long’s new book, “Darwin’s Devices: What Evolving Robots Can Teach Us About the History of Life and the Future of Technology,” is part Descartes, part MacGyver and part Douglas Adams, turning from rumination on the possibility of intelligence residing in a brainless body to tips on making artificial fish vertebrae out of coffee stirrers to the dopey yet endearing jokes that seem to flourish in laboratories all over the world.
Long works in a field called biorobotics, which builds physical devices to test hypotheses about animal behavior, rather than studying either the animal itself or digital models. Sometimes an animal can’t be studied for logistical reasons: marlins, for example, die in captivity and plesiosaurs are extinct. Computer models allow scientists to simulate complex, unreproducible conditions — say, the modeling of 10,000 generations of a particular organism — but as abstractions, they are prone to certain errors.
Robots, as Long explains, have their peculiar virtues. Long himself once created an impressive computer model illustrating how the marlin’s backbone helped the fish achieve its awe-inspiring swimming and leaping speeds, only to have a revered elder scientist note, “it appears to me that you’ve created a perpetual motion machine.” Robots, as Long points out, can’t violate the laws of physics. Instead of operating in a simulation of a physics-compliant environment, robots simply exist in the real universe, and must therefore play by the rules as a matter of course. At the same time, robots can be simplified to the degree that certain characteristics can be observed in isolation.
The main thing Long uses his robots to study is evolution. His first robot-fish experiment involved creating a bunch of large, tadpole-like “Evolvabots” designed to do one thing: swim toward a light source. With his team of students and fellow scientists — Long makes a point of mentioning the names of everyone who made significant contributions to his projects, a big departure from spotlight-hogging senior-scientist tradition — he rated their success at this imitation of “food-seeking” behavior. The robots (called Tadros) were given tails of varying degrees of stiffness and length and were then “mated” (algorithmically) over several generations to see if this would lead to selection for certain kinds of tails. The hypothesis Long and his colleagues wanted to test was that primeval invertebrates evolved backbones because it improved their ability to feed.
The experiment didn’t work out as they’d hoped, mostly because, in designing the experiment, the scientists had failed to fully appreciate a factor called wobble. One of the most intriguing and important aspects of “Darwin’s Devices” is the way it places the reader in the lab, at the shoulder of people doing hands-on science, sharing in their frustrations (over disappointing data, recalcitrant grant committees and astutely critical colleagues), their successes and their failures. And Long does this so lucidly that you find yourself caught up in the process, grasping the basics and eager to learn the results. It’s the best depiction of how science really works that I’ve ever read.
“Darwin’s Devices” could also administer a chastening rebuke to the many laypeople who talk and think sloppily about evolution. Determining exactly how growing a backbone helped ancient invertebrates thrive might seem superfluous to the quick-and-dirty school of cocktail-party Darwinism. Obviously, backbones helped because otherwise vertebrate animals would never have evolved. But as “Darwin’s Devices” illustrates, we can easily mistake the reasons for the evolution of certain traits by jumping to what seem like “logical” conclusions, and natural selection is not the only evolutionary pressure applied to a species. There are times when you just have to build something to understand how it works.
For example, the next type of robot Long and his colleagues developed they named Madeleine (because it is shaped, roughly, like the little French cakes). Madeleine had four paddles at each corner of its body, much like the extinct plesiosaur, a marine reptile. This creature was a tetrapod: a sea-dwelling animal descended from land-dwelling ancestors. Living aquatic tetrapods include whales, dolphins and sea otters, but “none of the living aquatic tetrapods ever use all four appendages to swim underwater — they only use two.” With Madeleine, the researchers hoped to figure out why this is so, since “it sure seemed like using four flippers for propulsion should be better in almost any way imaginable.”
It isn’t, actually, and that launched yet another branch of inquiry about why the plesiosaur used four flippers at all. If it’s that easy for legitimate scientists to be mistaken about something as seemingly simple as four-flippered locomotion, you can see why so many of them regard popular but highly speculative pastimes like evolutionary psychology as pseudoscience.
One party who has found the activities of Long and his robotics lab keenly interesting is the U.S. government. It’s not a big leap from “robot fish” to the notion of defense applications, and Long, despite a youthful infatuation with all things military, finds this troubling. But not that troubling! After a bit of hemming and hawing about it — noting that, if over 50 nations are pursuing military robot research, then American scientists can’t afford to opt out — he plunges into rampant (and, I must say, fascinating) theorizing about what sorts of robots would work best in battle. They need to be complex enough to cope with contingencies, but simple (i.e., cheap) enough that commanders aren’t afraid to burn through them.
Long ends with these cautionary words: “The reality is that evolving robots are and will be created for academic, industrial and military purposes. This means that we should all become students of robots of any kind, whether they be evolving robots, nonevolving autonomous robots, or semiautonomous and remotely controlled military robots. We need to understand robots so we can proceed with due caution and deliberation.” Yikes! And probably true. “Darwin’s Devices” will get some of us, at least, a little closer.
For a long time, those of us who monitor the troubled relationship between science and the American public had at least one thing we could feel good about. And that was knowing that while we might argue endlessly over global warming or the teaching of evolution, at the end of the day Americans in general still expressed strong confidence — strong trust — in the institution of science and its leaders. Spats over a handful of divisive issues didn’t seem to have soured them on science across the board.
The evidence for this came in the form of polling data from the General Social Survey, which for decades has asked people to rate their level of confidence in the leaders of a variety of institutions. Even at a time of declining trust in institutions in general, science always seemed to fare pretty well by this metric. “In 2008, more Americans expressed a ‘great deal’ of confidence in scientific leaders than in the leaders of any other institution except the military,” noted the National Science Foundation’s 2010 “Science and Engineering Indicators” report, which serves as a clearinghouse for these sorts of public opinion findings.
Last week, however, such claims seemed to all but fall apart.
In a new study published in the American Sociological Review, Gordon Gauchat of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill analyzed responses to this “confidence in institutions” question — which has been asked since 1974 — based on the political ideology of the respondents. And in doing so, he found that confidence in the scientific community had declined quite dramatically among self-described U.S. political conservatives. This downward trend in the data, says Gauchat, had previously been hidden by “not breaking out the political part of it” — by treating all Americans as a uniform group.
And not only did Gauchat find that, from 1974 to 2010, conservatives marched away from the scientific community. He also found, quite disturbingly, that this had a surprising and paradoxical relationship with their levels of education. It turns out that it was the educated conservatives who became the most distrusting of science over time — a phenomenon that I have called the “smart idiot” effect, and that likely reflects their higher level of political knowledge and engagement. Liberals, in contrast, remained relatively uniform in their trust in science over the period.
In one sense, I suppose I should be gratified by these results: Gauchat explicitly set out to test the thesis of my 2005 book “The Republican War on Science,” and writes that his results provide “strong evidence” in my favor. (Not that this is the sort of thing that you want to be right about.) But how do we explain this occurrence — this big move, by conservatives, away from science?
Just as I did in “Republican War,” Gauchat points the finger at the rise of the “New Right” as a political movement in the 1960s and 1970s. He underscores how upstart conservatives generated their own alternative sources of expertise — in other words, created their own version of reality, scientific and otherwise — at think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute. The goal was to hit back against liberal academia, as well as the intellectuals and scientists who worked there.
At the same time, conservatives also forged an alternative media universe — centered on Fox News and Rush Limbaugh’s radio show — where scientists often fell under attack on a key set of politicized issues like global warming, evolution, embryonic stem cell research, and many others.
The idea, then, is that conservatives came to define the worlds of science and academia as a liberal domain that was biased against them — one they had to actively combat by generating their own sources of “counter-expertise.” And naturally, this led to decreased trust in scientists and their institutions, especially among the most politically attuned conservatives, who were most familiar with the nature of these battles, and tracked them most closely.
Sounds plausible enough — but is that the full story?
There’s no doubt it’s partly true; but in recent years, I’ve come to question whether it is a complete account. In particular, in my new book, “The Republican Brain,” I emphasize that beyond such surface-level political and sociological explanations, we also have to examine the powerful sub-surface psychological determinants of political behavior. Really, you need both types of explanations, combined, before you can understand many political phenomena.
In a psychological sense, there are many reasons to think that self-described political conservatives today are just different people than they were in 1974 — more rigid, more closed-minded. Consider, for instance, the work of political scientists Marc Hetherington of Vanderbilt and Jonathan Weiler, also of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. In their 2009 book “Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics,” Hetherington and Weiler show that the U.S. became not only more politically divided, but also more psychologically divided, during the time period in question.
The chief catalyst for this development was Nixon’s infamous “Southern Strategy” and the rise of an array of “culture war” issues during the 1960s and 1970s. As a result of these forces, Hetherington and Weiler explain, a group of people called “authoritarians” — a generally conservative personality type characterized by cognitive rigidity, viewing the world in black-and-white terms, and holding fixed beliefs, often fundamentalist Christian ones — became much more strongly clustered in the Republican Party, and the conservative movement, than they had been previously.
In other words, the “conservatives” analyzed in Gauchat’s study seem to have changed psychological identities over time. According to Weiler, “those self-identifying as conservative have been increasingly likely to be authoritarians over the past generation.”
This occurred for a number of reasons, Weiler explains. Concerted attacks on “liberalism” pushed working-class whites — once supportive of the New Deal — away from embracing that label; instead, the term came to be more associated with the civil rights struggle, and later, with women’s rights and gay rights. At the same time, the political mobilization of conservative Christians — many of them authoritarians — helped draw a much stronger linkage between calling oneself a “conservative” and embracing religious fundamentalism. “As liberalism and conservatism came to be redefined,” explains Weiler, “authoritarians had reason to gravitate much more readily toward one ideological camp, and one political party.”
So under this theory, it’s not just that movement conservatives built think tanks that allowed for an end-run around scientific expertise. And it’s not just that they constantly attacked academia, where liberals and scientists were clustered. It’s also that people inclined to view the world in black and white terms increasingly came to call themselves “conservative” in the first place.
How does psychological authoritarianism set the stage for a distrust of science? If you see the world in an authoritarian way, then you’re more likely to dismiss your ideological opponents (scientists or otherwise) without compromise — to define them as an out-group, an “other.” At the same time, you’re also less likely to appreciate the nuanced, measured style of thinking and writing that is so typical of scientists (and for that matter, liberals). It just won’t feel right to you. Authoritarians are known for their intolerance of uncertainty; yet uncertainty is the lifeblood of science.
And indeed, if you look at the Tea Party today — a highly authoritarian group of people, according to Hetherington and Weiler — this is exactly what you see. Take the issue of global warming. Not only do Tea Partyers dismiss the overwhelming body of science showing that humans are causing it; polling data also show they’re confident they don’t need any more information about the issue. They’re not just wrong, then; it’s considerably worse than that. They’re wrong and also sure of themselves.
It is important to acknowledge that authoritarianism refers to a psychological trait or disposition, not an explicit ideology. At least theoretically, it’s content neutral. So it’s conceivable that in a very different political context, authoritarians might well have lined up behind science, rather than against it. That would be an odd political case, though; especially in a democracy, it’s not very likely that authoritarianism and science will get along very well together, any more than that authoritarianism and liberalism will go together. They’re just such deeply opposed ways of thinking — and being. You could argue that the clash between science and authoritarianism dates all the way back to the time of Galileo, if not farther.
Gauchat’s findings are the farthest thing from heartening — especially when combined with Hetherington and Weiler’s. But together, they do give us an opportunity to examine the root causes of the ideological war on science now being prosecuted by political conservatives in the U.S. You can’t begin to address a problem until you find its source. And in this case — as in so many others — that source appears to lie in both politics and also psychology, combined.
Salmon go to great lengths to kill themselves. After a short few years frolicking in the open ocean, they may travel thousands of kilometers to get back to the precise stretch of the same river in which they were born. On this journey they will have to slip past the birds, bears, sea lions, and humans that gather at river mouths to feast on them. They must swim exhaustively upstream for many miles, using most of their energy reserves to leap up waterfalls or swim ladders (artificial waterfalls constructed on the sides of artificial dams) until they reach their spawning grounds, where their last gasps are spent producing eggs or fertilizing them with sperm before collapsing in death, never to see the ocean again.
From an evolutionary standpoint, it’s not hard to find sense in these suicide missions — the salmon are passing on and multiplying their genes in a habitat that has already been proven (by the adult salmon’s own experience) to produce strong and reproductively fit salmon. People tend to admire the determination of the salmon. At the very least, we generally don’t call the salmon “irrational” or “crazy” for their journey. We do, however, freely launch those pseudo-psychological assessments on human suicide bombers. Yet salmon and suicide bombers are not as different as their outward appearance would indicate. The most important difference between them is neither fins versus arms, nor gills versus lungs, but that the salmon (despite the dams choking up the rivers) still lives in the environment its ancestors evolved in for thousands of generations, while the suicide bomber does not. Suicide bombing is just an extreme case at the far end of a spectrum of behaviors related to establishing and reinforcing self-identity that impart survival to organisms.
The naturalist’s view on security doesn’t allow us to simply label something “irrational” and then dismiss it. Just as a biologist wants to get to the root of what makes a peacock grow such outlandish feathers or an immune system suddenly turn on its own host’s body, a natural-security approach tries to get inside these behaviors that compromise our security, tracing their roots back as deep in evolutionary time as possible and figuring out what they mean in today’s society.
Evolutionary psychologists, who study the ancient roots of modern human behavior, argue that religious fervor didn’t develop in the modern world but in a world completely unlike the one we have briefly inhabited now. In this early world, humans lived in small close groups that struggled constantly to obtain enough resources to survive. Only rarely did they encounter small groups of other humans, and if their interaction wasn’t about trading resources, it was likely because one group was trying to take the other group’s resources by force.
Yet almost all political analysis of human behavior tries to explain it within the narrow confines of the immediate sociopolitical environment. Some public commentators try to get us to broaden our thinking. Journalists try to remind the most short-sighted among us that there were clear signs of terrorist activity against Western targets years before 9/11. Historians admonish us to open our eyes and look at the thousands of years of history in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Political scientists urge us to look at individual security crises within their global context. I fully support these viewpoints, but I suggest that analyses digging back ten, a hundred, or even a thousand years must be nested within a perspective that goes back orders of magnitude deeper into human, and biological, evolution.
Oddly, a virologist, Dr. Luis Villarreal of the University of California–Irvine, has made some key discoveries about human belief systems. The evolution and development of viruses, it turns out, is inextricably tied to almost every major evolutionary advance, including the rise of modern humans, in Earth’s history.
What Villarreal emerged with is a synthesis that traces the origins of human belief systems back to the earliest life forms, such as bacteria. The exact forms of these belief systems obviously differ between, say, a bacterium, a salmon, a chimpanzee, and a suicide bomber, but the mechanism is the same. In Villarreal’s theory, belief, as we know it in humans, is a form of addiction. And addiction in its pure form, according to Villarreal, is one of the oldest processes of self-preservation on the Earth, traceable to the earliest invasions of bacteria’s genetic material by viruses.
Although viruses seem to cause chaos in our daily lives—at the least, they cause sick days and frantic parents rearranging day care schedules, at worst they lead to epidemics that kill millions — the virus itself wants stability more than anything. In this sense, a virus is like a businessman trying to maintain a steady clientele. More particularly, the virus is like a drug dealer trying to develop a clientele of hardcore addicts. It does this by offering protection to its clients, something like a safe place to shoot up, shielded from the police or other junkies. This safe place is created by paired genes—called an addiction module by Villarreal — that the virus inserts in the bacterial genome.
One part of this pair (called the toxic gene) is destructive, killing all entering foreign bodies at will. If this gene was left to its own devices, it would destroy everything, including the host bacterium’s genome itself. So it is paired with a counterpart (the antitoxic gene) that confers immunity to the host. This simple opposing pair—aggressor and protector — provides a way to distinguish, even in the most basic organisms, self from nonself. If something is “self,” coming from the host’s own body or genome, the antitoxic gene allows it to reproduce. If something is nonself, a foreign invader, the toxic side destroys it. It’s easy to see why the bacterium, or indeed any other organism, would get addicted to this product pushed on it by the viral parasite — without it, any number of invaders, including the virus itself, could destroy the bacterium.
The story would end there with bacterial addicts if it wasn’t such a good system these viral pushers set up. When biological systems emerge with an idea that works, it gets made again and again. Sometimes the idea is replicated exactly; thus we humans have major components of our genome (especially those vital to survival) that are nearly identical to goats and fiddler crabs and even those earliest viral parasites. But often times, good ideas are merely mimicked, taking on different forms for different organisms in different environments, even as they maintain the same basic function.
A way to detect self from nonself is one such really good idea in biology. Nearly all organisms benefit from such a system. It allows them to identify who is likely to share their interest in producing common offspring and who is likely to disrupt that chain of genetic descent. It allows them to distinguish who to school with and who to swim from, who to eat and who to eat with. Even below the level of organisms, self–nonself identification is essential. In species where females mate with multiple males, the seminal fluid around the males’ sperm has evolved to protect its own sperm and destroy the sperm of a rival male.
As organisms get more complex in their behaviors, they need ways to identify potential mates and potential enemies. They need ways to assess a competitor’s intentions. They need ways to make friends and influence others. Villarreal argues that the same basic addiction system — a system that confers simultaneously both protective and destructive powers — fulfills all these complex needs of biological organisms.
Take the suicidal salmon. Young salmon cue into the precise chemical cues in their home stream. Then they make their way out to sea, traveling thousands of miles over two years or more, before returning to the precise part of the same stream in which they were born, in order to mate. While they may navigate by ocean currents and stars and magnetism in their open water phase, what gets them back to that precise stream riffle where they were born is the smell. Salmon possess a remarkably effective chemical-sensing organ called a vomeronasal organ (VNO). Villarreal argues that the VNO system is the same type of addiction module as the toxic/antitoxic gene pairs in viral-bacterial interactions. Indeed, a VNO system is another one of those evolutionary success stories that gets replicated in animals as different as salmon, snakes, and shrews.
For salmon, a sense of self and a sense of place are inexorably linked. Any particular salmon is literally defined by its home stretch of stream. In the salmon’s VNO system, home-like smells are intensified in the system and honed in upon, and non-home-like smells are rejected and effectively ignored. As a result, the salmon will relentlessly target their home spot, past anglers’ hooks and gaping sea lion jaws and enormous concrete dams with their artificial fish ladders as a small (and only partially effective) concession to the salmons’ unyielding will. What we admire as the incredible determination of the salmon is exactly the nature of self-identity addiction. The high threshold of acceptance into the “self ” category ensures that only the most fit will survive and reproduce. This addictive system, by the time it appeared in its particular form in salmon, already survived billions of years of relentless natural selection. What are some scattered predators or concrete barriers in relation to that track record?
Like the salmon VNO, our own behaviors have driven us to do remarkable things. Our behaviors allowed us to cooperate in complex ways and form strong groups, bonded for life. In small, clever groups whose members had a deep intimacy and mutual understanding and specialized in different tasks, we pulled through any number of forces—predation, bad weather, changing climates— that could have easily wiped out our weak and nearly naked bodies.
For salmon, group survival comes in part from a common set of olfactory cues that urge the fish to simultaneously migrate to natal rivers and spawn. But humans don’t have such a great sense of smell. The popularly bandied idea that invisible pheromones control our behavior, not to mention the endless iterations of supposed pheromone products purported to “drive women wild with desire,” appears to have little backing in olfactory science. While smell plays a subtle and not completely understood role in human mating, smells don’t play the dominant outward role in human identity. That is because higher primates and humans essentially turned our VNO systems off. The genes that form the VNO system are still there, but they don’t get activated. Those genetic changes have obvious outward manifestations. Have you noticed, perhaps while walking your dog, that we humans don’t scent mark or eagerly sniff one another’s nether regions when we run into a friend on the sidewalk?
But we do mark territory; just look at the graffiti scrawled across the walls in the tough neighborhood where Luis Villarreal grew up. That written marks were substituted for scent marks is a clue to the force behind our current sense of identity. Written symbolic language, which recent reexamination of the earliest cave paintings suggests may date back, not three or four thousand years, but perhaps as long as 30,000 years, is a uniquely human attribute and one that codifies our identities—especially our group identities.
Written language has a key role in codifying religious beliefs. As Villarreal points out, the word literate originally meant “one who can read holy scripts.” Not only are religious beliefs often spelled out in written tomes, but religious myths also contain curious references to written materials. God doesn’t just tell Moses the Ten Commandments; he gives them to Moses in written form on stone tablets. And when Moses grows angry with the Israelites for their idolatry, he smashes the tablets as a symbol of the broken bond between the Israelites and their one true God. The deference to written scripture goes beyond Judeo-Christian religions as well. A well-respected Japanese Shinto group, Oomoto, was codified in the late nineteenth century when Deguchi Nao, a supposedly illiterate housewife, suddenly had a vision that she transmitted into calligraphy that she scrawled across the walls of her cottage. This is not to say that nonliterate cultures can’t develop religious beliefs, but rather that written language provides a powerful symbolic shorthand for ideas that defy observable natural phenomena.
Defiance in the face of observable evidence is something that continually baffles outsiders trying to understand behaviors of individuals in tightly bound human groups—be they scientists trying to debate creationists or CIA agents trying to understand why someone would blow himself up for a cause. The rationalist-evolutionist deftly dismantles the structure of creationist theory with a few pieces of devastatingly incontrovertible evidence, but then can’t understand why the school board (freshly stocked with evangelical Christians) votes to “teach the controversy” in her daughter’s public school. People coming from this rationalist perspective tend to think that the resistance to rational testing of ideas is a weakness of religion — when in fact the opposite is true. Religious beliefs, perhaps more than other human belief systems, function well as a strongly addictive system because they substitute symbolic group identification for any type of rational-based test of group fidelity. The core ideas of religious conviction are universally true to believers and will remain so as long as adherence to religious laws is maintained, regardless of what some egghead scientist or analyst says.
Indeed, the high bar of irrational thought associated with most religions is a selective force that increases the strength of the belief system through time. Stream reaches that require salmon to make large leaps of gravity to get home and religions that require large leaps of faith for acceptance into the sect both enrich their populations with individuals that are especially capable of making these leaps. In part, this is an example of “honest” or “costly” signaling — there is no bluffing your commitment to the group if you will injure or kill yourself on its behalf.
Just because they are deep-rooted does not mean belief systems are necessarily locked in forever. Certainly, we’re able to trade more primal evolutionary signals for modern ones. That is why a short, nearsighted, balding weakling, who would have been an evolutionary dead end in our hunter-gathering days, may still find a fine mate, especially so if he drives a Ferrari. If a modern human female can calculate that the resource-gathering ability of the Ferrari driver may make up for his obvious physical weaknesses, so too can a modern Israeli or Palestinian realize that coming to the negotiating table with an eye to the future rather than to the insults of the past will lead to a much better future than engaging in escalating acts of violence. A modern jihadist can recognize that continuing his education, learning new skills, and getting a
mainstream job will give him a far better chance of propagating his genetic code than committing an act of martyrdom. Still, many do not, and it would help to understand why they do not.
Adapted with permission from “Learning From the Octopus: How Secrets from Nature Can Help Us Fight Terrorist Attacks, Natural Disasters, and Disease” by Rafe Sagarin (Basic Books, 2012).
It was just garbage, most of it: crushed Pepsi cans, cigarette butts, stray bits of rope, old bottle caps swimming in a bed of wet sand. Ugly stuff, forgettable stuff: It was exactly the sort of no-account junk you’d expect to wash up at the “Dash for Trash or Treasure” beach cleanup culminating the recent weekend-long Ocean Shores Beachcombers Fun Fair, on Washington’s Pacific coast. But each time an earnest steward of our shorelines trundled out of the dunes with a sack full of it, Curtis Ebbesmeyer brightened with anticipation. And then the good oceanographer adjusted his thick leather work gloves and watched, hungrily, as the detritus was dumped down onto the folding wooden table that sat before him, in the breezeway outside the Ocean Shore Convention Center.
Ebbesmeyer sifted through the colorful piles. “Now this is interesting,” he said with curatorial precision. “Here’s a pretty good nose cone to a fireworks thing.”
Sift, sift, sift. An aluminum candy bar wrapper, some fishing net, a sandy AAA battery, some dental floss, a bit of Styrofoam cup. A volunteer stood at the end of the table, obligingly holding a trash barrel, and with an unceremonious flick of his forearm, Ebbesmeyer, who’s 69, and tall with glasses and a white beard, swept almost everything — over 99 percent of the even ton he examined that Sunday morning — into the waste stream. But even in the act of rejection, he was somehow benevolent, his movements schlumpy and lumbering, his commentary speckled with genial wisdoms. “Now this shotgun shell here would make an excellent science project,” he said. “Anyone want to do a science project on shotgun shells?”
In time, a woman approached with her iPhone, to show Ebbesmeyer a photo she’d taken of a shipwreck: a small piece of planked wooden boat painted red and half-buried in the Ocean Shores sand. She wanted to know if the boat was of Japanese provenance.
“Well, I’m not an expert on wooden boats,” said Ebbesmeyer, “but red is a very popular color in Japan.”
Based in Seattle, Ebbesmeyer is arguably the world’s foremost authority on flotsam. He is the author of the 2009 book “Flotsametrics and the Floating World,” and also the man who named the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. He is not academic, but rather a freelancer who prefers to “teach to the public” by writing and publishing a quarterly newsletter, Beachcombers’ Alert! He was here, at his 20th consecutive fun fair, as beachcomber culture — often sleepy and preoccupied with conch shells — was enjoying a rare moment in the headlines. Debris unmoored by the March 2011 Tohuku tsunami, in Japan, is now floating across the Pacific, many tons of it. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projects that it won’t reach North America until 2013. But over 50 beachcombers from Humboldt County, Calif., to Kodiak, Alaska, have now claimed, with Ebbesmeyer’s fervent support, that they’ve already scooped the first arrivals off the sands. Mostly, we’re talking about oyster farm buoys, which sit high out of the water and thus sail fast. In his April Alert!, Ebbesmeyer says that, since October 2011, his readers have documented more than 400 buoys findings.
And several of these finds were sitting inside the Convention Center, amid 27 Fun Fair exhibition booths in the spacious Pacific Hall. They were ungainly things — hulking cylinders of white Styrofoam and black polyethylene, each one roughly the size of a garbage can. They were scuffed up and sandy, a vague affront to the lacquered driftwood artwork nearby. Still, on Saturday Ebbesmeyer lingered beside them, pointing out the white oysters crusting one buoy handle. “It doesn’t get much better than that,” he reveled. “Oysters don’t grow out in the middle of the ocean. They grow on the coast of Japan.”
The tsunami isn’t just a detective project for Ebbesmeyer, though. A few minutes later, speaking to a standing-room-only crowd of 100 in the Surf Meeting Room, he laid out a dire scenario, suggesting — in contrast to NOAA’s reassuring public pronouncements — that the tsunami debris may be radioactive. “There’s a chance that some of the buoys got mixed in with the ‘hot’ water,” he said. “If you’re looking at this debris, you should be wearing hand protection.” He went on to say that soon American shores would be awash with whole boats, and with intact Japanese houses, some of them perhaps even bearing street number signs. “We might have a hundred Japanese families coming over here to look for their belongings,” he said.
A collective gasp filled the room. This was all heady stuff for beachcombers, whose hobby first flourished back in the 1930s, when Americans began collecting globular glass fishing floats after they bobbed west from Japan. The first beachcombers fair took place in Seaside, Ore., in 1968, showcasing beach glass, furniture carved out of old ships’ wheels, and messages in bottles.
Today, beachcombing has become an ever more diverse art. Con artists market fraudulent “beach glass” smoothed in rock tumblers, and in Ocean Shores, one woman was selling funky necklaces strung with plastic beach debris-sawed-off toothbrushes, for instance, and old toy tires. Still, the fairgoers were graying, largely, and many of the objects for sale were quaint and old-timey. One mature vendor was offering homemade birdhouses decorated with beach-gathered pinecones. The joys of beachcombing are quiet — it’s simply about searching for chance finds amid the soothing roar of the waves — and the pastime is fading in today’s Xbox nation. There are now only five annual beachcomber fairs in the U.S.
Still, as Ebbesmeyer sorted trash, kids caromed about him, drawn in somehow by his looming, galumphing presence. At one point, a small boy stepped toward his table with an elongated lime green can with unusual writing on it. “Is this from Japan?” he asked.
“Actually, I think it’s Russian,” Ebbesmeyer said, “but it’s a cool can.”
Ebbesmeyer sorted. A plastic fork, a rock, a small scrap of lumber. Eventually, he intimated that a second batch of tsunami debris was beginning to join the oyster buoys on American shores. Displayed at Ocean Shores were several large white plastic canisters bearing Japanese print. “At first,” Ebbesmeyer said, “I thought that they were gas cans. But there’s a young Japanese woman here and she told me that in Japan people keep cans of vinegar by their stoves. It makes sense — people eat a lot of fish in Japan. And when I opened one can, it did smell like vinegar. We’re going to watch these cans. We’re going to start tracking them.”
(Credit: Galyna Andrushko via Shutterstock) 
A detail from the cover of "Games Primates Play: An Undercover Investigation of the Evolution and Economics of Human Relationships" 
A detail from the cover of "Darwin's Devices" 
(Credit: Reuters/Salon) 
(Credit: iStockphoto/MichaelFossler) 
Debris left by the 2011 tsunami is piled up in Ofunato, Iwate Prefecture, northeastern Japan. Tsunami debris is now washing up on the West Coast of the U.S. (Credit: AP/Itsuo Inouye) 
