Author Archives: Brick Wahl

Contagious cancer

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In shellfish, the Live Science headline says, cancer can be contagious. “Recently scientists discovered that cancer cells can sometimes escape an organism and spread to others. These cells are clones that are nearly identical to the originals, save for mutations that might have popped up since they diverged from the initial cancer cells.”

Genetic analysis of the cancers and their hosts revealed that in nearly all of these cases, the genetic makeup of these cancer cells did not match those of their hosts. Instead, the cells came from other animals. Then comes the kicker. The finding suggests that transmissible cancers might be far more widespread than previously thought.

I knew that there was a contagious facial cancer afflicting Tasmanian devils (and in fact, decimating the population.) They nip each other in the face like you and I shake hands, but while we once spread warts (mom told us) they pass on a horrific cancer. And I didn’t know they’d found contagious cancers in dogs, spread by puppy love. But these involve intra-species transmission, though, one he dog to a she dog, or one snarling Tasmanian devil to another. The thing about this news story, though, is that they’ve found a cancer had spread from a clam to a mussel, that is, inter-species transmission. And while there’s no way you or I will ever catch this cancer–we are way too different from clams and mussels, even the dumbest of us–it does mean that we might be able, some day, to catch a cancer from another primate species, at least. Or maybe even from Fido, wagging his tail every time you look his way? But as no cancer has jumped from human to dog or vice versa in the 20-30K years that dogs (née wolves) and people have been hanging together (I assume we could have detected any such transmission genetically) it seems unlikely. Specific cancers are too tied into specific genetics to be able to just flit from one mammal species to a distantly related other, and people and dogs and all their carnivore and primate predecessors and their pre-carnivore and pre-primate predecessors have each been on their merry but separate evolutionary way for maybe 80 millions years, as dinosaurs still stomped about. And though both are mollusks, the last common ancestor of mussels and clams existed over 480 million years ago. Yet half a billion years later a clam can “catch” cancer from a mussel. A half billion years is an incredibly long time, both in terms of deep time and genetics.

We might catch the same sort of cancer from the same carcinogen as a dog, but it’s highly unlikely a dog’s cancer cell could settle amid our healthy people cells and metastasize. But here a cancer in mollusks that has done just that. No one knows how, though there is one revolting hypothesis that it comes in excrement that floats on in with sea water, a mussel leukemia transmitted in the way we transmit cholera, though all we ever did was drink and bathe in the water, while mussels eat and breathe it. The sea is their air. Imagine breathing in cholera laden air, as if all the old ideas of bad air causing epidemics (“malaria” comes from the Italian for bad air, mal aria) were true. Perhaps that is how this cancer (a mussel leukemia) spreads. Not that the mussels are thinking about it. But I am, and the entire idea is creepy. You have to wonder how often this happens. In a small population a contagious cancer could theoretically push a species to the point of no return. Perhaps even a hominid species. What have the evolutionary implications been over the past half billion years as cancers crossed from one species to another closely related species? Has genetic variation been driven, in some small sense, by mutations that allowed an individual to fend off the wandering cancer cells from a closely related species that had devastated his otherwise identical siblings?

Thinking about cancer is bad enough. But thinking about contagious cancer gives me the willies. Change the subject, please.

You, a chicken, and a banana.

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(from a comment on a Facebook post I can’t remember)

We share about equal amounts genetic material (I think it 60%) with a fruit fly, a chicken, and a banana. And we are virtually identical genetically–about 99.9%–with all other humans. Though that is genes only, we actually develop at various rates (heterochrony they call that) and turn into the mélange of different looking people you can see all around you. Still, each of us are so identical genetically even if we look sometimes drastically different that we can have sex with each other and create new people who are also 99.9% genetically identical and find partners who look nothing like them and also make babies. It might take a lot of liquor, but it is possible. The important thing is that 99.9% compatibility, which is why we cannot make babies with a fruit fly, a chicken, or a banana. As for the inherited characteristics within that one tenth of one percent that is not identical, the further back you go generationally, the less that any of the genetic material in that one tenth of one per cent have to do with specifically inherited characteristics. For instance, you don’t like music because your great great great grandfather liked music. You probably don’t even have red hair because he had red hair. There are too many variables. Between you and your red headed music loving great great great grandfather are 31 separate couplings by 62 people resulting in 31 births. That’s 31 eggs, 31 sperm cells, and having sex 31 times. We would scarcely be related at all to our own great-great-great grandparents, as we have thirty two of them and what there is of them within our genome would be a mess of scattered bits and pieces coupled fairly randomly with each generation between us and them. Which is good because most of my ancestors were crude peasants with pre-modern hygiene issues. Imagine that family reunion.

Liquefaction in the Heart of Screenland

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Oh (he says to a seismically hypersensitive friend), you work in Culver City…. That explains how you felt an earthquake (technically a microquake) that measured 2.8 on the Richter scale.  I try to notice nothing below 4.0, but then I am jaded. But Culver City is built on the Los Angeles River floodplain. In fact, the Ballona Creek that trickles unnoticed though the neighborhood was an alternate channel for the L.A. river in its carefree, unchanneled days. And the soil there must be many feet deep, sediments that go who knows how far back, and are more sandy than clay, given the source (the Santa Monica Mountains). What this means for your nerves is that sandy alluvial soils are prone to liquefaction, and amplify the slightest of earthquakes, so that something beneath of dignity of an Angeleno sitting on bedrock, as in my neighborhood, is noticed by highly sensitive types in Culver City. Were it a more manly earthquake, something, say, in the vicinity of an 8 plus, the earth beneath you would be as water and you’d never be heard from again, and Amoeba could at last have what remains of your record collection.

Here’s a link to a convenient map of the Culver City liquifaction zones. They’re in teal. This map is available on Culver City’s official website, though I doubt they tell anyone, since there’s more teal than is tasteful. Teal is best in small quantities. It’s a pungent off-blue and a little goes a long way, like a rank cheese. Also it makes Culver City look so screwed. Like beyond screwed. Like doomed. Which it’s not, really. It’s that damn teal. Pastels would have been much better.

Incidentally, Culver City is the Heart of Screenland.

 

Stromatolites

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The World’s Oldest Fossils Are 3.7 Billion Years Old says the headline. They were discovered in Greenland. Apparently some Aussie paleontologists went all the way to a just as uninhabitable part of the earth as the Australian Outback–just colder–to find fossils of lifeforms older than anything in their own country.  And it’s not like they were looking for them–I have no idea what they were looking for, actually, it doesn’t say–they just happened to look closely at some rocks poking out of the melting snow (you rarely hear paleontologists complaining about global warming) and immediately recognized the distinctive shapes held therein. Stromatolites!  And if there is one place on earth with rocks older than Australia, it’s Greenland. Both are mostly craton–that is big pieces of ancient land that have sort of wandered about the globe with the tectonic currents, not being ground up by continental plates and belched back up as new igneous rock formations in the mid open trenches that stitch the ocean floor. Iceland, the whole island, is part of that grinding and belching process that somehow is above sea level. As such, Iceland is about as opposite from Australia or Greenland as any place on the surface of the globe can be. There are no fossils on Iceland, it is far too new and the rock was all basically molten not long ago. Australia and Greenland, though, were in large part land that was formed maybe four billion years ago, when land was first invented, and in Australia at least there is still some of it in virgin condition (we can’t see most of Greenland yet, it’s still ice and snow covered). Both the Australian and Greenlandic cratons contain incredibly ancient rocks, and where sedimentary rock was laid down a couple billion years ago in ancient shallow seas, you will find incredibly ancient fossils. The land today is so untouched in places that in the depths of Australia there is a famous fossilized beach, you can even see the ripples left in the sand by the waves. Groovy, in an incredibly ancient kind of way.

Of course, we are not talking dinosaurs here. We are billions of years before dinosaurs fossils, before almost anything even. Fossils from that far back are few and far between. Mainly, if not exclusively, they are stromatolites. There were untold jillions of stromatolites then, vast immobile herds of stromatolites luxuriating in the young planet’s overheated waters. Indeed, Earth was a young planet full of stromatolites with no one to eat them. It was sort of a vegan paradise. Since then, though, predators were invented and stromatolites have sheltered in the less hospitable places on earth, overheated and hypersaline. There they thrive, ignored, virtually unevolving. Were we to zap one of the fossil stromatolites with a time machine gun, it wouldn’t look much different than they do today. Hence they call today’s stromatolites living fossils, like coelacanths and horseshoe crabs and cycads and the Rolling Stones.

Australia had the oldest fossilized stromatolites in the world, nearly three and a half billion years old. Or they did until the Australians I mentioned above went wandering about the ancient rocks of Greenland and found the newest oldest fossils. Two hundred and twenty million years older, in fact. To give you an idea of how big a span that is, two hundred and twenty million years ago we mammals had just been invented. We were just squirmy little shrew like things, not very appealing. And birds hadn’t been invented at all. That’s how big a span of time two hundred and twenty million years is. And these Australian paleontologists found stromatolites in Greenland that were two hundred and twenty million years older (3.7 billion years old) than the celebrated 3.48 billion year old stromatolites from the Marble Bar Formation in the Pilbara region of way the hell out there Western Australia. Imagine having your oldest fossils rendered penultimate, just like that. By your own countrymen, no less. What a blow to the Australia paleontological ego, if not the body politic itself. The Government of Western Australia’s website even has a whole page boasting of “the world’s oldest known examples of fossil stromatolites (3.45 billion years old), found near Marble Bar in the Pilbara.” Ahem. Our trio of Australian paleontologists–we’ll leave them unnamed–will be a very popular bunch in the roadhouse in Marble Bar, the metropolis in the Pilbara closest to the now second oldest fossils, that’s for sure. No more free beers. Though they did push back the evolution of life on Earth even further than had been imagined. If relatively complex (by bacterial standards) stromatolites were flourishing 3.7 billion years ago, then bacteria itself must have been around much earlier than that. And the planet itself is only 4.5 billion years old. Life started here much earlier than we thought possible. I doubt, though, that would impress the locals at the roadhouse in Marble Bar. Their metropolis (population 208) was famous for one thing, and one thing only, the world’s oldest fossils. And now you’ve told everybody that they are the second oldest?

But even though the Pilbara stromatolites are a mere 3.48 billions years old, Australians can still brag (“some of the best examples of living microbialites“) that they have living stromatolites, if you call that living. Because several hundred miles to the southwest of Marble Bar, as the emu flies, is Shark Bay, and in the hottest, saltiest part of Shark Bay is a thriving stromatic metropolis. Probably the world’s most famous living stromatolites, actually, even David Attenborough paid a visit. Life forms just like this, he said with breathless and beautifully enunciated excitement, came to be in the Pre-Cambrian. He didn’t touch one. They’d feel like a slimy lichen. Which is sort of what they are, big stacks of slimy lichens, mostly made of cyanobacteria, and nowhere near as cuddly as the wallaby Attenborough had doubtless been cavorting with a day or two before.

However, despite their sliminess, these living stromatolites mean that Australia has had conceivably the longest continuous stretch of communal living on the planet. Even as the Australian craton wandered about the earth, bumping into other cratons and slowly bouncing off again, it had stromatolites. Even when the planet was wrapped in ice–the Snowball Earth hypothesis, a scary one if correct–some Australian stromatolites clung to some little saline hotspot. And they are still there, building up into stromatolites a couple feet high mat by microbial mat, like those layers of lichen you see on rocks but with little grains of sand worked in and held fast by slimy bacterial excretions to provide the structure the way we use girders to build our skyscrapers (though to a cyanobacterium a two foot high stromatolite would be millions of times taller than the Empire State Building.) They link their little flagella together somehow too, like holding tiny bacterial hands, and then they sit there and metabolize. That’s about it. That is what stromatolites so. No scurrying about like in an ant colony or a beaver dam or Los Angeles. Just four billion years of stromatolites doing essentially nothing, but doing it together. There are so many possible jokes here I can’t decide on just one so never mind.

Meanwhile, Greenland gave up on stromatolites permanently (or at least until the next super continent congeals in a half billion years or so) when Pangaea broke up and Greenland scooted pole-ward. Way too cold for stromatolites up there–they like their water hot–and not enough hypersalinity (though there are also examples of freshwater stromatolites in a few places around the world, including a pond that is only forty years old.) So while Greenland has the oldest stromatolites, if Greenlanders want to see their living salt water equivalents they have to go nearer the equator–Mexico, Brazil, the Bahamas. Or about as far away as a Greenlander can go, Western Australia, which is where those Aussie paleontologists are now, being yelled at by drunken Pilbarrans angry about being the second oldest. There goes all that tourist money.

Anyway, many years ago, back in my own personal Pre-Cambrian era, I decided that one day I’d write something about stromatolites. Now I did. I thought then that there would be more of a sense of achievement, of completion. Instead I feel empty and stromatoloid. Some bucket list this is.

stromatolites

Shark Bay stromatolites. Feel the drama.

Siberia

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Odds are you have never heard of the Ob River or of Novosibirsk. Perhaps you’ve seen them on a map and wondered. Well, the Ob is the Mississippi River of Siberia (well, one of three…but the Ob is the biggest). And Novosibirsk is the Chicago of Siberia, a thriving economic engine and cultural center, a million and a half people in the middle of a continent. You don’t know them well now. There’s been no need. Both city and waterway are about as isolated from America as any place on the planet can be. But your children and their children will know of them, the way people in Siberia have heard of Chicago. And they will know because the icecaps are melting and the Arctic Ocean will be navigable and interconnected with the rest of us. Now you fly in on a rickety Russian airliner. Or make the endless drive on the Trans-Siberian highway to get there to Novosibirsk, or take the Trans-Siberian Railway. Both are somewhat beat up. Novosibirsk is an island in the middle of the land, very difficult to get on or off. The open arctic will change all that. The open arctic will bring new railroads, improved highways, airliners that don’t scare you. Port cities draw infrastructure to them. Look at a map. Notice how all across the world there are railroads and highways and canals radiating out from ports. There is so much money to be made. Look at a map of the Great Lakes and all the cities on their shores. Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Toronto, Buffalo, and up the St Lawrence, Montreal are all major inland ports. Between them smaller port cities dot the shore. The Great Lakes Megalopolis is vast and economically powerful and helped to shape the modern world. Such is probably the future of Novosibirsk and all the other cities deep inside Siberia–Irkutsk, Kemerovo, Krasnoyarsk, Novokuznetsk, Omsk, Barnaul, Tomsk, Tyumen–that sit on the huge rivers drain the immense central Asian watershed into the far distant Arctic Ocean. Connected to the rest of the world by sea, the cities will thrive and grow and become powerful. What is still a string of czarist outposts will begin to come together as something not Russian at all, but Siberian. And for maybe the first time ever, a major civilization will arise from the Russian taiga. It will be a mix of Russian, Central Asian, Siberian and Chinese peoples. It will be exploiting a land that has barely been touched by human hands. It will have vast resources, and, being so new, will have few mistakes to undo (and many to make). And it will could just have the same mammoth impact on the world as the industrialization and economy and agriculture and resources and money and culture and ideas of the American Midwest had on the world. The Midwest was a blank canvas for American civilization. The natives (my wife’s family among them) were a tragic distraction who never had a chance. The genuine threat–slavery–was annihilated. With the end of the Civil War the Americans went crazy with innovation. Modern mass industry was perfected in the Midwest. Chicago was the template for all cities thereafter. Large scale agriculture, even modern ways of shopping (pre-internet) came out of the Mid West. Unlike almost everywhere else (including the U.S. south) there were no wars or revolutions in the Midwest to mess things up. And the place was so devoid of people that it was populated with millions of immigrants and emancipated slaves, all adding their own cultural DNA to the mix. The American heartland was a riot of ideas and invention and innovation and social experimentation. The people on the coasts laugh, and the people in the South are offended, but the nation we are today was created in the Midwest. It was a lab for everything new. Its industrial output helped to keep the fascists from winning WW2, its agricultural output fed Europe after the war. It was an economic powerhouse on a scale never seen before on the planet. Indeed. a sizable chunk of the CO2 that is melting the polar icecaps today originated in the American Midwest. Which, ironically enough, is what is making this Siberian powerhouse possible. What the American midwest was for a century Siberia could be for new century. It might be a lab for everything new. All because of global warming. All because the ice is melting. The earth will be hotter and life will probably be harder and the world will be more interconnected than it has ever been. And the very concept of east vs west–which is how we see the world now–will become obsolete. What was east or west will now be to the north and then south, across an Arctic Ocean shimmering beautifully in the midnight sun.

Novosibirsk, two million people as far away from anything as two million people can be, for now anyway.

Novosibirsk, two million people as far away from anything as two million people can be, for now anyway.

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Cheshire Cat

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It’s amazing how you can see Venus and Mars regularly in the big bad city anymore. Just standing out on our sundeck after dark and there’s Venus in one direction, Mars the other, and then you get the brief empty nothingness feeling and realize just how significant you are, really. Just nothing. Everyone around you, just nothing. The whole freaking history of man, nothing. Nothing at all. All of evolution, all that genetic history, all that life and variation will be burned to nothing by a dying sun and then there will be void. Endless void. Eternal, infinite void. A cold dead universe, finally, expanding and expanding and expanding…..

So you stare at the moon instead and think of the Cheshire Cat.

Cheshire Cat

Cheshire Cat

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I prefer Thunder Lizard, personally

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(from 2015, when I was apparently too proud to post it.)

When the brontosaurus was sent packing, apato me went with it. That was before social media, though, and I could only annoy a handful of friends with that joke. Now the brontosaurus is back in the news–Brontosaurus stomps back to claim its status as real dinosaur–I can annoy hundreds of people. Thousands even. Technology is amazing.

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Four years of college and all I got was this lousy Darwin Award

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(2014)

I wonder how many of the people making smarmy Darwin Award comments understand that there is nothing Darwinian about the Darwin Awards at all? Because Darwin Awards based on strict Darwinian theory would have nothing to do with being stupid. They would be about not having children. Or, childless, having never assisted in the upbringing of blood nephews or nieces who themselves have children. That’s who’d get the Darwin Award. It’s not about brains, it’s about progeny.

Which means, whoops, I win a Darwin Award.

Well, not really. I have some nephews, though I haven’t exactly been an attentive uncle. But same genes, so I am disqualified on a technicality. Had I dropped my brother from a third story window or better yet talked him into joining the priesthood, then I’d scoop up my Darwin Award.

But I didn’t. I have those four nephews. Great kids, all of them. And therein lies the future of my genetic heritage. Or some of it. Me and my brother don’t have exactly the same genes. Same parents, but not the exact same genes in the exact same order. Who knows what bits of junk DNA I have that he doesn’t. And impossible to explain (or even pronounce) heterochronous traits like me being so damn hypermorphotic I can’t find shoes that fit. My brother can find shoes. His kids can find shoes. It’s possible that my huge frame will lie recessed waiting to pop up in some huge baby somewhere in the future. But I think probably not. Something went a little amiss with me. Junk DNA maybe. A Hox gene that went rogue. Odds are that those are a one time only deal. But there’s genetically enough of the same between us, as siblings, to make sure that some of what is in me was also passed on to my brother’s own sons and into their children and on down the line for a few generations (after a few generations it gets so divided up and scrambled it’s not anything recognizably me anymore). And in Darwinian terms shared genes are all you need to succeed. A brother isn’t perfect, gene wise, but he’ll do in a pinch.

Now what about Jose Canseco, butt of a zillion Darwin Award jokes this week for blowing off his own finger? Yeah, that was stupid, blowing off his own finger while cleaning one of his handguns. Really stupid, actually. The middle finger, too, my favorite. But stuff like this doesn’t matter, no matter how dumb it is. What does matter is that Jose Canseco has a daughter. So no Darwin Award for him. Much as you all want to give him one, he doesn’t qualify.

In fact, even if Jose Canseco had no children and shot his middle finger off cleaning a loaded handgun, he still wouldn’t qualify for a Darwin Award. Because Jose Canseco has an identical twin brother, and an identical twin brother, gene wise, is perfect. If that brother has children it’s the same thing as Jose Canseco having children. Identical twins pass on identical genes, or as close as you can get to identical this side of parthenogenesis (i.e., cloning). So even with nine fingers, it’s a Darwinian win/win situation for Jose Canseco. The Jose Cansecos of the world don’t receive Darwin Awards. They hand them out. They call you Double Income No Kid dinks up on stage and hand you a shiny statuette of Charles Darwin. People laugh. You shake Jose’s bandaged hand. He yelps in pain. His identical twin brother leaps up and decks you. You fall backward. The audience, every one of them the spitting image of Jose Canseco, is in hysterics. Then you wake up.

Meanwhile I type this last line with ten fingers and the realization that some fool with nine fingers will have an impact on the coming evolution of the species that I will never have. Because as natural selection goes–and that is the core of Darwin–the winners pass on their genes. And the losers, well, don’t. We’re dead ends. We die, and our individual genetic traits–the blend of our parents that developed, in my case, into me, the guy writing this–will die with us. Disappear. Poof.

Oh well, no use crying over spilled milt.

charlesdarwin2

Charles Darwin had ten children, sparing him the ignominy of a Darwin Award.

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Road cut

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(Found this in the drafts, it must be a decade old at least.)

The drive to Lake Hughes via San Francisquito Canyon Road took a helluva long time but was gorgeous and great sight seeing with amazing roadcuts…man, the fault has done some  terrible things to those rock layers. Some were busted into fragments and frozen in place and solidified. All this incredible, slow motion tectonic violence, immense layers of rock ground to particles, destroyed. Who knows what they were, islands, maybe, they think California is the result of islands, small little land masses all smooshed together at the edge of the North American craton. A zillion  faults run through everything, Los Angeles shakes, makes us all nervous, things fall over and break. Oh well.

Solimar

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(Found buried in the drafts, I think it’s from 2015.)
Unfortunate news, this fire…when the rains come this portends mudslides in the burn area and a blocked 101. I suspect the people living on the strand there are feeling a little nervous, considering that stretch’s history. La Conchita is only a couple miles up the 101 and has had three major slides in the last 20 years. The center of gravity on those very loose ocean-facing slopes is completely different soaked than it is dry, and when saturation reaches critical mass acres of earth will slump almost silently downward till it reaches a point where a new and correct center of gravity is reached. Back in 2004 or 2005 ten people were killed in La Conchita, buried alive. There was no warning. Suddenly the hillside slid down, and acres of top soil– with vegetation eerily in place–remained intact, just in a new place. It’s a tiny place, La Conchita, just a village, and we drove round its few blocks after the first slide in 1995 just to get a close up view of a of the power of mud on the move. On the street that had borne the brunt of it the fronts of houses were intact but the insides had been forced through the front windows by sodden earth, one of the eeriest things I’ve ever seen. Fortunately the homes in Solimar Beach are the ocean side of the freeway, not as threatened as La Conchita which is tucked between the 101 and the bluffs on a little sliver of a plain that must have seemed heavenly–there was a banana farm there, so unique was the microclimate–till the earth came down on top of it. It seems heavenly again, too, and now that the bluffs have done their sliding perhaps they are safe again. Not so Solimar. All that ground is still up there overhead, and when the rains come from the southwest they can open on those hills like the biblical flood. California has amazingly dynamic geology, so much movement, some inexorably slow and some instantaneously sudden, and you’ll find yourself staring at a boulder the size of a house sitting in an open field and have no idea how it ever got there.