Stories of the Periodic Table: A Review of The Disappearing Spoon

Sam Kean's The Disappearing Spoon and Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of Elements (2011) captures the wonder and power of the periodic table through myriad stories of the elements themselves, as well as stories of the scientists and others whose lives intersected with them.

When I studied it in a college chemistry class, I was fascinated by how the arrangement of the periodic table captured the essence of the different elements and predicted their relationships to each other.

(The version of the table presented above was downloaded from the Los Alamos National Laboratory website.  As the product of a government agency (which I hope will continue to exist), I assume it is in the public domain.)

Kean, a widely published science writer, provides enough science for the reader to gain an appreciation of the basis upon which the table functions, though, to some extent, in his hands, that's secondary to the adventures and misadventures of the people he describes.  It's the latter that moves the book along.  He writes

[T]here's a funny, or odd, or chilling tale attached to every element on the periodic table.  At the same time, the table is one of the great intellectual accomplishments of humankind.  It's both a scientific accomplishment and a storybook . . . .  (p. 7)

As Kean notes, an element is "a substance that cannot be broken down or altered by normal, chemical means."  (p. 15)  Further division destroys it.  One simile he uses for the periodic table is a castle.  The overall shape does hint at castle turrets and walls.  Critical to that analogy is that each brick in the structure, representing a discrete element, is crucial to the table, moving or removing any one of them brings down the structure, putting a line to the arrangement.  The other simile Kean employs is that of a map.  Where an element falls on that map "determine[s] nearly everything scientifically interesting about it.  For each element, its geography is its destiny."  (p. 13)  How that map is read is critical.  He stresses that horizontal relationships in the table are perhaps less significant than vertical ones because reading up and down the columns "reveals a rich subtext of relationships among elements, including unexpected rivalries and antagonisms.  (p. 31)

Key to the entire table is the number and arrangements of electrons in each element.  They are located at different energy levels in the atom, and, beyond the two needed to fill the innermost level, each atom will beg, borrow, or steal enough electrons from other atoms to populate its uppermost level with an appropriate number, usually eight.  Kean stresses that the "octet rule" does explain a great deal of the behavior of atoms, particularly how they combine with other atoms.  Elements are placed in the table according to their atomic number, that is, the number of protons in the nucleus, which, in a neutral atom, is also the number of electrons in the atom.

Kean captures the importance of this when he discusses the different bonding behavior of carbon and oxygen.  Oxygen, element number 8, has 8 electrons and, given that 2 of them are in the lowest energy level, the higher has 6.  This means oxygen is impelled to garner two additional electrons (the octet rule) which, he notes, isn't too difficult a task, meaning oxygen can be choosey about which elements it bonds with.  In contrast, carbon at number 6 has 4 electrons in its highest energy level and needs to find another 4 to satisfy the octet rule.  "That's harder to do, and the upshot is that carbon has really low standards for forming bonds.  It latches onto virtually anything."  (p. 35)  This helps explain why life on Earth is carbon-based.  Carbon, ever in search of electrons, bonds into complex chains of atoms and constitutes "the backbone of amino acids, which string together like beads to form proteins."  (p. 34)

Each chapter of the book is organized around a cluster of elements because each cluster provides fertile ground for a linked set of stories, not necessarily because the elements in a group are reflective of relationships shown in the table.  A few of the element groups he creates are:  medicinal elements, elements that have been caught up in "pathological science" (think cold fusion), elements explored at extremely low temperatures, elements with a strong financial facet, elements discovered as part of cold war politics, and elements that in direct or subtle ways poison human beings.  (A minor quibble:  Kean would have done the lay reader a favor by defining each chemical symbol used at the beginning of each chapter.)

The stories in each chapter of the elements and the people somehow linked to them serve to capture science being done methodically and carefully with beautiful results, or science replete with errors or happenstance.  Lives are bathed in glory or disappointment, honors are won and also lost.  Indeed, in these stories, lives may be lost.  It's an amazing panoply of human emotion and action.

Representative of the way Kean approaches his subjects is his description of the source of the book's title.  In the chapter he titles The Galapagos of the Periodic Table, Kean tells stories involving the elements arsenic, gallium, cerium, yttrium, yttrium, erbium, and terbium.  The chapter title highlights the importance of the Swedish hamlet of Ytterby on the island of Resaro to the periodic table.  In Kean's telling, Ytterby is as central to the periodic table as were the Galapagos to the theory of evolution through natural selection put forward by Charles Darwin (1809-1882).  (I will return to this comparison of the periodic table to the theory of natural selection later.)  The last four elements grouped in this chapter are rare-earth elements, all discovered in a mine at Ytterby (as were three others not in this chapter grouping).  Yes, Kean recounts why Ytterby was so rich in these rare-earth elements and how they were discovered, but it's gallium (unrelated to Ytterby) that, to my mind, occupies center stage in this chapter, though it's but one small part of a very busy chapter.  Gallium, element 31, was among the elements whose existence was predicted by Dimitri Mendeleev (1834-1907), the so-called father of the periodic table, using the table he'd constructed.  Later, when a Frenchman, Lecog de Boisbaudran (1838-1912), claimed to have discovered this metal, a debate ensured over who should have credit.  It's unclear from Kean's account who really prevailed in the tussle, though the element has kept the name Lecoq de Boisbaudran assigned it.  It's the predictive power of the Mendeleev's periodic table that's the big take-away from this chapter for me.  But Kean balances that aspect of the gallium story with a bit of humor.  Remarkably, gallium at normal room temperature is a solid, but it turns to liquid at 84 degrees Fahrenheit or higher.  Further, it's one of the rare liquid metals that can be safely touched with a bare hand.  He  writes:

As a result, gallium has been a staple of practical jokes among the chemistry cognoscenti ever since . . . .  One popular trick, since gallium molds easily and looks like aluminum, is to fashion gallium spoons, serve them with tea, and watch as your guests recoil when their Earl Grey "eats" their utensils.  (p.54)

Hence, the "disappearing spoon."

Though I thoroughly enjoyed the book and learned much from it, I dissent from Kean on one important point.  When he discusses Mendeleev's work on constructing his periodic table (Mendeleev didn't create just one, but, over time, many variations, and many more have been designed subsequently), he makes the following assertion:

Overall, Mendeleev's work is comparable to that of Darwin in evolution and Einstein in relativity.  None of those men did all of the work, but they did the most work, and they did it more elegantly than others.  They saw how far the consequences extended, and they backed up their findings with reams of evidence.  (p. 53)

What troubles me about that statement is that I believe that what Mendeleev fashioned, better than anyone had before him, was a table providing a visual display of the elements, capturing the periodicity of characteristics of the elements and depicting very real relationships among them.  There is no denying the power of the table and impact it had on chemistry.  But, as I read Kean, Mendeleev did not understand why the table worked as it did.  Indeed, his organizing principle was not the atomic number of each element (its number of protons), but rather its weight.  For instance, Kean writes

Most of the elements line up on the table in a cattle call of increasing weight.  According to that criterion, nickel should precede cobalt.  Yet to make the elements fit properly - so cobalt sat above cobalt-like elements and nickel above nickel-like elements - chemists had to switch their spots.  No one knew why this was necessary, and it was just one of several annoying cases.  To get around the problem scientists invented the atomic number a a placeholder which underscored that no one knew what the atomic number actually meant.  (p. 99-100)

It took Henry Moseley (1887-1915), in the early 1900s, to discern the basis for the atomic number by firing electron beams at elemental atoms.  He determined that the wave lengths of the emitted X-rays reflected the number of protons in the atom's nucleus.  Thus, he "linked an element's place on the table to a physical characteristic, equating the positive nuclear charge with the atomic number."  (p. 100)

Given the lack of a fundamental understanding of why the periodic table worked as it did when it was initially put forward, I am hesitant to give it equal weight to Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection.  The periodic law that undergirds the table describes what the reality is for the elements; Darwin's theory of evolution explains why living organisms come in the diversity they do.  I think it's apples and oranges, though I will admit a bias in favor of explanation.

The Watches of Paul Newman and William Paley

Visiting a watch manufactory is a soothing experience during chaotic times, and the painfully slow assembly of these beautiful objects may well fall under the heading of "God's work."

Gary Shteyngart, Confessions of a Watch Geek, The  New Yorker, March 13, 2017.

This is a post about real watches and one hypothetical watch.  The hypnotic appeal of the real watches helps explain the power of the hypothetical watch which was used to create a logical argument for the existence of God and divine creation.  Darwin undid that argument.

I recently rediscovered a small bag containing items that I removed from my father's safe deposit box after he died.  It included this pocket watch (in the second photo, the back of the case has been removed).

It reminded me how easy it is to strip an object of its personal history:  just separate it from its owner.  From the notes my late mother wrote describing the contents of safe deposit box, it's not clear whose watch this was.  Even if I assume it belonged to my maternal grandfather (probably true), I still have no idea how he acquired it or whether he used it.  Nevertheless, for me, this watch or any mechanical watch remains potentially full of stories and abounds with attractive qualities.  Identifying who made a watch and when is frequently possible from the watch face, the case, or the interior of the piece.  Even absent such knowledge, the inner workings of a mechanical watch are still mesmerizing and the source of nearly endless pleasure, particularly if the watch actually works.  The sheer complexity of its parts and their careful and intricate arrangement which accomplishes the intended end of telling time are wondrous, a testament to human ingenuity.

This particular 17-jewel timepiece, labelled "Official RR Standard," was assembled and sold by the Ball Watch Company of Cleveland, Ohio.  According to the PocketWatchDatabase, it was probably assembled in 1905, part of a run of nearly 72,000 watches.  At the turn of century, Webb C. Ball, owner of the Ball Watch Company, capitalized on the need for accurate clocks and watches for the safe and efficient operation of the nation's railroads.  The company apparently did not manufacture the watches, but assembled them, or had them assembled, from parts made by other companies to exacting standards Ball established.  In due time, he was appointed the "chief of time services" on many railroads; 125,000 miles of railroad tracks were under his purview early in the 20th century.  "He had the authority to set the standards for watches carried by railroad employees."  (Robert Winslow, Webb C. Ball and the Railroads, Watch & Clock Bulletin, January/February, 2013.  See also, The Ball Watch Company on the Antique Clock Guy website.)  Presumably this pocket watch met the demanding criteria Ball set for the railroads.

As I was exploring the general history of this watch, I slowly realized that the current soundtrack to my days (that is, what is being looped on my phone) - the 2021 album See the World by the incomparable Brett Dennen - includes the song titled Paul Newman Daytona Rolex.

Here are the first two stanzas:

I never been accused of being fancy 

I'm not stupid with my money, honey, I could be stupid for free 

I took it to the Antique Road Show

They told me it was worth a boat load 

But I'm never gonna sell it, my grandaddy gave it to me

Paul Newman Daytona Rolex 

Perpetual motion you know this 

Second hand smoother than Cool Hand 

No tickin' for real 

It makes me feel like time is on my side 

Time is on my side 

'Cause, baby, I'm a man from another time

I had no idea what a Paul Newman Daytona Rolex was.  Turns out that's not an official Rolex name.  The company created the first Daytona watch in 1963 which featured an "exotic" dial (three-colored); the watch proved singularly unpopular (the exotic dial was part of its then limited appeal).  Nevertheless,  Joanne Woodward bought her husband Paul Newman a Daytona in either 1968 or 1969, and Newman wore the watch constantly as evidenced by the myriad photographs in which it appears on his wrist.  The Daytona watch was designed particularly for timing car races, hence the name invoking the Daytona International Speedway in Florida.  Newman himself was a dedicated race car driver.  In time, the early models of the Daytona, like the one Newman wore, grew in appeal to collectors and dealers and, because those models were so intimately associated the actor, came to be called the Paul Newman Daytona.  Apparently, some 2,000 to 3,000 of these watches are in existence and they command a premium price on the watch market.  Of course, the particular Daytona that Newman owned and wore is one of a kind, and, when it came up for auction in 2017, sold for an unprecedented $17,752,500. (For background on the watch, see Cara Barret, The Sale of Paul Newman's Rolex Daytona, The Most Expensive Wristwatch Ever, Hodinkee, October 27, 2017; Hyla Ames Bauer, Paul Newman's 'Paul Newman' Rolex Daytona Sells for $17.8 Million, A Record for a Wristwatch at Auction, Forbes Magazine, October 26, 2017; and Catherine Bishop, All You Need to Know about the Rolex Cosmograph Daytona, Swisswatches Magazine, August 8, 2021.)

How to account for the incredible appeal of Rolex Daytona (or is that "Daytona Rolex" as some like Brennen have it?) wrist watches?  Well, the early Daytona models are actually quite attractive timepieces, despite being initially unpopular.  Perhaps it's the limited number of these early models that is available that has fueled their desirability.  Still, much, if not most of the cachet is clearly because these watches became such an intimate part of the Newman mystique.  The actor was and is a Hollywood icon, to his fans, a god.  Brett Dennen offers another take on its desirability.  In his song, he is alluding to the timeless appeal of this model Rolex; that it draws its owner out of the present and links them to a deeper history, one presumably including Paul Newman.  He's also, I think, positing that over time the Paul Newman Daytona Rolex will only become more and more popular and valuable.

There's so much to a watch.

With watches on my mind, I suppose it wasn't completely out of left field that my thoughts segued at some juncture to William Paley's hypothetical watch that has played a central role in the debate over the anti-evolution construct of intelligent design.  Paley, an English clergyman and philosopher, wrote, among other tracts, Natural Theology:  or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802).  (The quotations below from his Natural Philosophy are from a 1848 edition.)  It's an over 500-page-long book presenting a closely argued exposition of how nature proves the existence and benevolence of God.

Paley opened the book by imagining that, if he were to be walking across the heath and stumble on a rock, there would be nothing to infer about the rock's origins.  (Well, actually, I think there would be much to infer were he knowledgeable about geology, but never mind.)  As far he would be concerned, the rock could quite possibly have been resting there forever.  But, in contrast, were his foot to hit a watch, there would be a great deal to surmise about this object, first of which is that it could not have lain there for eons.  Examination of the watch would reveal that its parts were assembled for an explicit purpose:  telling time.  He offered a rather detailed description of various parts of a functioning watch, showing clearly that a watch consists of a complex arrangement of many parts, and that Paley knew his watches.  Central to his argument is the following:

The inference, we think, is inevitable; that the watch must have had a maker; that there must have existed, at sometime and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.  (1848 edition, p. 6)

I have not read much of Paley's long treatise.  Rather, my understanding of his arguments about God is drawn largely from analyses by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould:  principally his magnum opus The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002, pages 121 et seq. and pages 262 et seq.); and his essay titled Darwin and Paley Meet the Invisible Hand appearing in Eight Little Piggies:  Reflections in Natural History (1994).  (The literature that considers Paley's argument about God in light of evolution through natural selection is quite vast.  One of the more influential pieces that argues persuasively against anything like Paley's position is The Blind Watchmaker:  Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design by Richard Dawkins (1986).)

Gould posited that, for Paley, it was not the complexity of the watch that was key (though it was important), rather, it was that the watch was clearly designed for an explicit purpose.  The evident configuration of the watch to address a specific need argued conclusively for Paley that there had to have been a watchmaker, that is, a designer.  He applied this line of reasoning to the many complex organic structures found in the natural world that are evidently well adapted for their intended purposes; one of his favorite examples was the human eye.  He argued that these complex structures far outshone those of a watch in terms of complexity and purpose.  He concluded,

The marks of design [in nature] are too strong to be gotten over.  Design must have a designer.  That designer must have been a person.  That person is God.  (p. 246)

Paley went further, arguing that the design and harmony one sees in such features of the natural world show that God is himself benevolent and harmonious.

Despite his closely reasoned argument, Paley comes up well short of his intended mark, not because of some inherent flaws in his logic (though there are those, one of which I consider below), but because he did not account for a powerful force that we now know operates in nature, a force that plays havoc with his conclusions.  Gould analyzed how Charles Darwin, in Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), decimated Paley's Natural Theology.  Darwin, who had studied Paley and was influenced by him, refuted him in the most fatal way possible.  Darwin, wrote Gould, could agree that "Nature features exquisite adaptation at overwhelming relative frequency."  (The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, p. 120-121)  But Darwin toppled Paley by holding

that this order, the very basis of Paley's inference about the nature of God, arises not directly from omnipotent benevolence, but only as a side-consequence of a causal principle of entirely opposite import - namely, as the incidental effect of organisms struggling for their own benefit, expressed as reproductive success.  Could any argument be more subversive?  [Darwin] accepts the conventional observation, but then offers an explanation that not only inverts orthodoxy, but seems to mock the standard interpretation in a manner that could almost be called cruel.  (The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, p. 120-121)

So, evolution by means of natural selection brings down the edifice of logic that Paley constructed so carefully, and it's not a force that one could argue reflects the character of a benevolent deity or any deity for that matter.  It's a force without design.  Keep in mind, though, that it's not random, rather, it's constrained by natural selection's constant testing of organisms.  The test is whether an organism survives and reproduces.  As Gould observed succinctly in a footnote which discusses the potential opponents to his natural theology that Paley identified and disposed of:

He never imagines that good order could also emerge as a residue of trying many things out and rejecting most.  (The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, p. 263, footnote)

The complicated organic structures that, for Paley, were reflections of the genius of God, the master craftsman, e.g., eyes, are in fact often jury-rigged by evolution from whatever is at hand, resulting in constructs that no such craftsman would employ, such as having the optic nerve in the human eye pass through the retina creating a blind spot.  Further, our complex eyes came into being through an incredibly large number of iterations, evolving through many organic configurations bearing little resemblance to human eyes as we know them, but offering in some measure the benefit of sight.  (See, for example, Sean Carroll, The Big Picture:  On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself, 2016, p. 289-290.)

Gould's characterization that evolution through natural selection tries things out and accepts only a few leads me to mention what I believe is an inherent flaw in the scenario with which Paley begins Natural Theology.  I recognize that Paley intended the watch to be an inferior though impressive analogue for the complex and functional organic structures one finds in nature.  But the logic that Paley applied to the watch - that it is so clearly built and organized with a specific purpose in mind which it well serves - ignores the fact that any watch someone walking across the heath in the early 1800s stumbled upon was not the product of a design that some watchmaker created out of whole cloth.  Rather, a watch, even in the early 1800s, was the product of experimentation over centuries, a process marked by partial or total failures.  In time, successful configurations, initially some with only limited ability to measure time, were built upon; Paley's watch had evolved in fits and starts, hardly the mark of a process in the hands of an all-knowing, omnipotent craftsman.  There was no single watchmaker, but rather many, and no single blueprint for a watch, but many, some better than others.  In a marvelous book on the history of watches, the author Rebecca Struthers, a consummate watchmaker, summed this up:

All of these early mechanical devices were suffused with the sheer joy of experimentation and discovery, the result of trial, error and endless possibility.  (Hands of Time:  A Watchmaker's History, (2023))  [Later edit:  Though Struthers at this point is referring to the earliest devices to mark time, not watches such as the one Paley imagined, the history her book recounts up to the beginning of the 19th century certainly merits the characterization I've given above.]

A beautiful mechanical watch, such as the Paul Newman Daytona or the hypothetical one Paley stubbed his toe on, couldn't spontaneously arise from the workings of natural laws, but natural selection can certainly generate a wonderfully complex organ such as an eye, and has done so multiple times in multiple configurations over the eons.

The Shipping Forecast - A Prayer For Now

 Maybe it’s the time of year or maybe it’s the time of my life, but BBC Radio 4’s The Shipping Forecast has come to offer solace as 2021 winds its way to a bleak end.

I was introduced to The Shipping Forecast (TSF) by a character in Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club (2020), who, as she ponders old, unsolved murders, writes in her diary:

All those murderers remained unpunished, all still out there, listening to the BBC Shipping Forecast somewhere.  (p. 23)

TSF, a weather forecast for British marine waters, casts its spell on the righteous and the sinful alike.

Over its many decades of broadcast, TSF has elicited many responses.  It has been mocked and parodied, and its words and cadences incorporated into poetry and fiction.  All this is testament to its staying power and its centrality to some form of identity for the people of the British Isles.  Mark Damazer, a previous controller of BBC Radio 4 (which currently broadcasts TSF), once said,

It scans poetically.  It’s got a rhythm of its own.  It’s eccentric, it’s unique, it’s English.

(As quoted in Poetics of the Shipping Forecast by Sanna Nyqvist, in Spaces of Longing and Belonging  Territoriality, Ideology and Creative Identity in Literature and Film, 2019.)

BBC Radio 4 broadcasts TSF four times a day; currently at:  00:48 Universal Time Coordinated (UTC), 05:33, 12:01, and 17:54, providing the weather forecast for 31 sea areas surrounding the British Isles.  Each area bears a distinct, evocative name.  These areas go far afield, touching the coastlines of Southeast Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, France, and Spain.  They are shown in the map below (along with coastal weather stations marked in red, whose weather is not part of the TSF).  Trafalgar is covered only in the midnight (00:48 UTC) broadcast.

(This map is available from Wikimedia Commons.  It was posted by Emoscopes and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

TSF is prepared by the Meteorological Office (Met Office) and each broadcast begins in the same way:

And now the Shipping Forecast issued by the Met Office, on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency . . . .

The broadcast is brief, typically read in a soothing, even-keeled tone, devoid of drama.  The first two broadcasts of the day are followed immediately by separate reports drawn from the coastal stations (see map above).

Given the ever-changing nature of weather, TSF’s content differs from broadcast to broadcast, but its structure remains fixed.  Each broadcast first provides a brief warning of where gales might be expected, and then a succinct synopsis of the overall weather pattern.  This is followed by a description of the next 24 hours for each of the general forecast areas in terms of wind direction and speed, weather, and visibility.  The forecast covers those areas in a clockwise fashion, beginning in the Northeast with Viking and ending with Southeast Iceland.

Each iteration of TSF has a specific upper word limit of 350 words, with a small bump at midnight (00:48) to 380 words when Trafalgar is included in the forecast.  As result of this limit, the forecast, in holding to a specific order in what it describes for each area, often drops nouns and verbs (for example, the first words and numbers provided for an area apply to the direction of the wind and its speed), and, in a further word-saving step, merges the forecast for contiguous areas when conditions are the same across them (e.g., "Forties, Cromarty, Forth.  Cyclonic 2 to 4 . . . . .").  This makes TSF sound, at first blush, like code (well, it is code) and perhaps a peculiar English dialect.

Here is the recording of a snippet from the December 23, 2021, midnight broadcast.  (This is my first attempt to insert an audio file in a post and it hasn't gone smoothly.  The embedded audio file may take a moment to begin to play after clicking on the arrowhead pointing to the right in the icon below.  If it doesn't play, refreshing the page might help.  Alternatively, the file can be made available by clicking on the arrow in the box that will appear in the upper right corner of the icon below automatically or when the cursor is moved to that area.)

One need not understand much of what TSF conveys to succumb to its magic, in fact, it probably helps not to translate it as it goes.  But even deciphering a bit of the forecast seems not to lessen its charm.  In the snippet I provided above, the opening forecast for Viking reads as follows:

Cyclonic 3 to 5, becoming northerly or northeasterly 4 to 6, increasing 7 later in north, perhaps gale 8 later in northeast.  Rain or showers.  Good, occasionally poor.

Translation:

Cyclonic = during the forecast period, a depression in the area will provide considerable change in wind direction

3 to 5 = measurements on the Beaufort Wind Scale – 3 is 8 to 12 miles per hour, described as a “gentle breeze”; while 5 is 19 to 24 miles per hour, a “fresh breeze”

becoming northerly or northeasterly = wind direction will shift to come out of the north or northeast

4 to 6 = 13 to 18 miles per hour winds (“moderate breeze”), and up to 25 to 31 mph (“strong breeze”)

increasing 7 later in north = wind in the north of Viking will increase to 32 to 38 mph (“near gale”)

perhaps gale 8 later in northeast = 39 to 46 mph winds (“gale”) possible later in the northeast of Viking

Rain or showers = the overall weather for the 24 hour period of the forecast for Viking

Good, occasionally poor = visibility will be more than 5 nautical miles (“good”) but sometimes between 1,000 meters and 2 nautical miles (“poor”)

Even with such a translation, I hear the words but miss the meaning.

I have come to TSF only recently, so I have no deep ties to it, no memories of listening to it under the covers as a child, no direct connection to the places it covers.  Still, it appeals strongly to me.  Just the names of the forecast areas are engaging, melodic, hypnotic as they are read in the forecast..  I know little about the actual locations - their physical makeup or their histories - but names such as Forties, Forth, Fair Isle, Dogger, or Rockall are wonderful to hear and to say.  These names create images for me, grounded in reality or not.

Further, I gain a curious sense of comfort and safety from the forecast.  That it begins by highlighting gales in the areas covered says plainly, there is danger out there,  Though the forecast spreads the out there across my imagination, that actually emphasizes that I am here, at home, sheltered from the storm.  What a powerful duality that is.  Peter Jefferson, a long-time voice of TSF, asserts that the midnight broadcast in particular has attracted a dedicated audience of listeners who consider it “something of a ‘must hear’ before the cloak of sleep envelops” them.  (And Now The Shipping Forecast:  A Tide of History Around Our Shores, 2011, p. 16.)  Snuggled warm in bed, the soothing tones of TSF gently caress the ears (no matter how turbulent the weather).

And, perhaps, a key element of its appeal to me is its predictability, its unchanging structure.  These days, the idea of a constant, never-failing beacon of light is irresistible.

From its inception, the forecast was, above all, a necessary service for the vessels braving the seas around the British Isles.  Its roots go back to 1861 when Captain Robert FitzRoy (later elevated to Vice-Admiral), head of what became the Met Office, started a storm warning system for British marine waters.  In the 1920s regular weather reports began on the BBC and have continued ever since (interrupted only by WWII between 1939 and 1945).  But TSF no longer provides a critical service for vessel plying these waters whose sailors have other options for securing weather forecasts.  As a consequence, Sanna Nyqvist describes shipping forecasts (she is writing about TSF and similar broadcasts in Finland and Sweden) as “relics.”  But relics that serve myriad other social and cultural purposes.

There are many essays, articles, and books about TSF and other shipping forecasts.  Peter Jefferson’s volume cited earlier is a conversational, congenial exploration of the history, structure, content, and cultural role of TSF.  The Met Office has produced a very useful introduction to the forecast – Shipping:  Fact Sheet 8 – The Shipping Forecast (2015).

Among the best articles is Sanna Nyqvist’s, which I cited earlier.  In it, she explores the  fictional, poetic, and non-fictional literature evoked by three nations’ shipping forecasts, paying close attention to the universality of responses to such broadcasts.  Of the countries she covers – Great Britain, Finland, and Sweden, each considers its shipping forecast unique, something not to be found elsewhere.  According to Nyqvist, the forecasts, sent out over the airways in cryptic language, speak to listeners of the past, of the settings in which they heard the forecasts in their childhoods, and offer a meditative and restorative balm.  It may not all be benign since some listeners may hear the shipping forecast speaking to their national and cultural identities against the threat of others.  Yet, she suggests, shipping forecasts may also engender an appreciation of the interconnectedness of places and people (consider the broad sweep of the areas covered by TSF).

Nyqvist captures an essential quality of TSF and other shipping forecasts where she writes

Through its ritualistic presentation on the national radio, the shipping forecast has become a part of the collective experience to the extent that it has become a secular prayer, a familiar chant sheltering its listeners from storms and perils.  (p. 53)

Would Captain Robert FitzRoy recognize any aspect of TSF, the present product of his vision for the Met Office and a system to warn ships at sea of impending weather?  He most likely would not ascribe any prayerful quality to the forecast given his hardened conservative Christian beliefs.  Prior to assuming leadership of the Met Office, his greatest accomplishments were the surveying voyages he commanded between 1828 to 1836 in the HMS Beagle.  Yes, that Beagle on which a young Charles Darwin sailed between 1831 and 1836.  FitzRoy and Darwin, despite an apparently productive relationship while at sea, fell out once back in England.  The difficult and troubled FitzRoy was critical of his treatment in Darwin’s account of the voyage of the Beagle, and opposed Darwin’s theory of evolution.  Four years after instituting that first storm warning system, FitzRoy committed suicide.

The closing couplet of Carol Ann Duffy’s sonnet titled Prayer may be a fitting conclusion to this post.  The sonnet offers a somber vision of unbidden memories of loss and regret penetrating lives, with comfort coming, perhaps, from the constancy of a quotidian litany.

Darkness outside.  Inside, the radio’s prayer – 
Rockall.  Malin.  Dogger.  Finisterre.

Finisterre is the weather area now known as FitzRoy.

Profiles in Scientific Creativity ~ A Review of Some Assembly Required

Thwarted in her desire to major in genetics at Cornell University because the major was closed to women at the time, Barbara McClintock (1902-1992) turned to horticulture, one of the university's acceptable distaff majors.  She made the most of this sexism,studying the genetics of corn and, in 1983, won a Nobel Prize for a key finding from that work.  Corn was a fortuitous focus of study:  each kernel on an ear is an embryo, thus providing a multiplicity of opportunities (about 1,000 per ear) to explore the functioning of genes.  Amid this wealth of genetically distinct embryos, McClintock found an area of the corn genome in which the chromosomes were fractured and, most tellingly, she saw that this area (a gene) with its chromosomal disjuncture moved around from place to place on the genome across generations.  When this gene landed in the midst of another gene that influenced the pigment of a kernel, the color pattern was disrupted.  But, if subsequently the gene with the breakpoint moved out of the pigment gene, the original color pattern was restored.  There is, she demonstrated, a startling degree of dynamism in the corn genome.

It was subsequently learned that these so-called “jumping genes” are ubiquitous, existing in all species, and as they move they copy themselves.  Indeed, nearly three-quarters of the human genome consists of such genes.  The picture that emerges is that of a genome marked by struggle between the jumpers and the genome writ large, a struggle to keep the jumpers within bounds possibly creating beneficial changes, and prevent them from doing grievous harm to the host organism.  Certainly, this was not the picture that science had painted previously of the genome.

McClintock's personal and professional story is told briefly in Some Assembly Required:  Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA (2020), a new book by paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin.   Of McClintock's discovery of genes that leap around the genome, Shubin writes, "This single insight was one of the great ideas in the history of genetics:  the genome is not static - genes can jump from place to place."  (p. 142)  Beyond just the identification of jumping genes, there has been a revolution in our understanding of how DNA and the genetic landscape function, a revolution that has profound implications for evolutionary biology, explaining how genetic changes that natural selection works with arise in the first place.  Shubin, in this new volume, offers an accessible, well-crafted introduction to the discovery and implications of these game-changing advances in our knowledge.

He structures his book entirely upon a scaffolding of well-crafted vignettes about individual scientists, offering glimpses into both personal history and scientific work.  An engaging construct that works.  The scientists are often wonderfully quirky and complex, working with myriad organisms - from sea squirts to corn to amphipods (little beach sand creatures).  Particularly in the early years, these scientists often did their study of gene functions with low-tech implements, refashioning and using whatever they have available (think MacGyver), and applying creative thinking to hypothesize from what they found.  The stories that Shubin has brought together offer a view of the scientific process that shows how much grit, luck, and creative insight are actually involved, and how nonlinear it is.  Shubin characterizes the process these scientists followed as mirroring in many ways how changes occur in the genome.

St. George Jackson Mivart (1827-1900), an irascible character to be sure, is the first scientist Shubin introduces to us.  Mivart isn't in the book because he had some critical insight or made a crucial discovery.  Rather, he’s a reagent, here because of the reaction he elicited from Charles Darwin (1809-1882).  Mivart, accepting of evolution though he was, published a volume skewering the evolutionary gradualism that Darwin espoused in On the Origin of Species.  Mivart argued that truly major changes in organisms could not occur through incremental changes whose initial steps would have no evolutionary value, but had to come about in leaps, appearing whole cloth and setting organisms on new and different paths.  As Shubin notes, the problem Mivart identified is what paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) labelled the "2% of a wing problem."  In other words, what good is just a small portion of a wing?  Shubin writes that Darwin responded to Mivart in the 6th edition of On the Origin of Species, adding a new chapter, which utterly disposed of Mivart's objection and the 2% problem.  His core argument came in just five words.  He asserted that evolution of physical attributes might occur "by a change of function," one of the foundational ideas in evolutionary biology.  The use we ascribe to a physical feature need not be the use for which it originally arose.  In an incipient stage, such a feature might have served perfectly well some other purpose.  The evolution of feathers is an iconic example.  The current thinking is that feathers first emerged for thermoregulation and only later, more fully developed, were shifted in use to flight.  Indeed, repurposing is a hallmark activity within living creatures’ genomes.

Over the course of the book with its accounts of individual scientists and their discoveries, Shubin describes some of the key ways that evolutionary change occurs in living organisms.  Among them are:

Biological features can be shifted from their original uses to new ones – The example of feathers was just cited.  Shubin outlines how overarching this process is within genomes from the simplest single-celled organisms to more complex multicellular ones.  For example, the genomes of those unicellular taxa contain the very genes that, in many celled animals, create the proteins central to building their bodies, but here they are being used for different purposes.  “Microbes adapting to their world developed the chemical precursors that animals later used to make bodies.  Multicellular life is possible only because new combinations of molecules were repurposed from there original function in single-celled life.  The great inventions that made bodies possible predate the origin of bodies themselves.”  (p. 206)

Features can serve more than one purpose – A dual-use example are swim bladders in fish.  Yes, they ultimately evolved to become our lungs, but in fish they have served either as a means to control buoyancy or as lungs to breathe, or, in some taxa, both.

An unused feature can be reemployed for a new use – Only about two percent of the human genome is made of genes, much of the rest has been labelled "junk" because it appears to just sit around doing nothing.  That said, it shouldn't be considered "garbage" because it contains evolutionary potential, and, given the dynamism in the genome (for instance, think "jumping genes"), some portions of it may be switched on at some point in the future.

Alteration of the timing of events in the development of living organisms from larva to adult fuels evolution – The versifying (literally) scientist Walter Garstang (1868-1949) demonstrated, with salamanders, that small chemical changes can trigger fluctuations in the pace of development of an organism or its endpoint, a process that can have major consequences, including setting in motion the transition from invertebrate to vertebrate life.

Organisms can evolve by coopting, utilizing, and incorporating other entities – For instance, perhaps ten percent of the human genome consists of dead viruses, some such viruses have critical functions for us, including the fashioning of memory.  Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) recognized the similarities between certain organelles in the nucleus of the cells in complex organisms, and bacteria and blue-green algae.  She argued, quite correctly, but against great resistance, that these organelles were in fact the descendants of bacteria and algae that had been coopted and put to use in cells long ago.

These among the aspects of genetic change in living organisms that generate the variations upon which natural selection works.  In a previous book, Your Inner Fish:  A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (2008), Shubin described the morphological features of humans that had evolved over the millennia from those found in fish.  The present volume is a companion to that earlier book, describing how those changes might have occurred, delineating the genesis and the genetics of key changes in the genome needed for life to make significant changes, including the transition from fish to land dweller (e.g., changing fin to fingers).

 

Having mentioned Your Inner Fish, I feel the need to observe in conclusion that, for all of its virtues (and there are many), Some Assembly Required pales in comparison to that earlier volume which changed forever how I view the human body, and is one of the most persuasive arguments yet advanced against creationism.