The Great Pumpkin Pie

Forget turkey. Pumpkin pie is what defines the Thanksgiving table. Its orange ochre silkiness and notes of nutmeg evoke an anthem of autumnal comfort.

This year, for 9 minutes, we stopped to watch the parade balloons inflate. Then, we escaped the tourist-laden streets to have drinks with a friend. After drinks, we went on our pie-seeking way. We headed to the bakery ranked 3rd for the best pumpkin pie in the city. Why 3rd!? Well, numbers 1 and 2 were on the East side, or below 14th St, and the sun was setting fast on Thanksgiving eve. We rushed into the bakery flushed with hasty holiday warmth and anticipation. “We only have the big pies left”, they told us. Our gluttonous minds momentarily fixated on the words big pies, “ We’ll take one!”

On Thanksgiving Thursday, before turkey, and way before any actual conscious giving of thanks, we woke to coffee and a piece of this upper west side tertiary pie. The coffee was, as always, satisfying and delightful. The pie was—to my chagrin—not. Its disappointingly dense body rested in an overly buttery, almost greasy, un-crust. Our mouths considered it, but our hearts didn’t. We mumbled something, blamed ourselves for settling for 3rd, got dressed, and went to my Mother’s for the official celebration.

The meal concluded. And with perfectly cooked turkey behind us, we hunkered down for what we had really come for. My brother had made a pie from scratch, so we left the sub-par pie at home. Now this pie, my brother’s pie, was really something.

It looked as if the filling would spill out all over the table when sliced into, but it didn’t. The first piece I removed stood there on the plate, miraculously contained and regal. It would be a model for all pumpkin pies to come. To be precise, the filling was both pumpkin and yam. And the crust was an expression of ephemeral flakiness. My brother—who I always thought would have made a fine scientist—made the crust with vodka instead of water. The vodka wets the crust mixture at the right time but then evaporates completely when cooking, leaving no trace of vodka flavor, no sugary gluten, only a perfect pie crust in its wake.

With a dollop of lightly-sweetened whipped cream on top, we had what was probably the best, the lightest and most sublime pumpkin pie, ever. As we ate this pie together, we incidentally paused in silence. I know its flavor memory will flirt with our senses for Thanksgivings to come.

Out at the Beach

This September, we went back, even though some of us had never been there before. The place was Rockaway Beach, NY, the date September 25th and the mood, optimistic.

My parents met each other when they were about 9 years old. My father's parents owned a bungalow on Rockaway beach in Queens, my mother's family rented. Each summer, on Memorial day they packed up the big old American cars and drove from East Harlem, and from Corona, out to the beach. They stayed until Labor day. Almost every single summer was spent out there until the early 70's. By then, all three of my older brothers had been born. My mother and my aunts swam with flowered bathing caps, my dad rowed in peace with only the dog in the boat, they watched jets from Idlewild Airport roar overhead and pranced around with the confidence that comes with having fun.

What happened during those summers at the beach was, I am sure, typical of many middle class New York families during that time. But to me, it has always seemed other-wordly and not only because I wasn't there. You see, my family isn't the most festive bunch. They don't allow themselves to embrace many things. Most activities, events and life decisions are met with, what I would call, extreme trepidation. But not the beach. When they talk about the beach, their eyes shine with something else. Its the most happy and the most sad that they will ever be. I know it. My dad's beach bungalow was burned down by vandals. My eldest brother remembers seeing all the items in the house that had been stored for the winter burned in the middle of the living room, and the fiberglass boat melted. They never went back. It was too painful and time was rough on the old neighborhood.

Until this year. My mom read an article about a woman who was organizing a beach cleanup on Rockaway in an effort to preserve the beach and its unique wildlife. She suggested we all go and help. We sat on our comfy suburban couch and wondered if she was serious. But she was. And we all went. My husband and I took the A train all the way out there, getting a full view of the expanse of beach as the train passed through someone else's memories. My parents and brothers met us out there.

We broke up into two teams. We put on gloves and picked up trash. We recorded what we collected. The purpose of the cleanup is to keep a record of the items dumped on the beach in an effort to correct the litter problem and to monitor its effect on the local environment. My brother (who remembers the melted boat) and I, walked further away from everyone else, cleaning steadily. We were met with a wall of extremely tall reeds and grasses. It was well over our heads. My brother walked straight in. I followed. I worried about ticks as I was repeatedly tickled by what was probably fairly dirty beach grass. We kept walking. I didn't know when we would emerge. But I followed my brother. Suddenly, I looked up to the tops of the grasses to see the largest cluster of monarch butterflies that I had ever seen. They fluttered liberally. It was pretty darn close to something childlike and magical. Below our feet, hoards of hermit crabs rushed around with somewhere important to go.

We eventually did emerge from our beachy-natureland, into a diverse pile of garbage; shoes, candy wrappers, couch foam, styrofoam, car bumpers, soda cans, you name it.

When we were done that day, my dad tried to take us to a restaurant that had been there last time he was there. It was gone. So, we drove further into Queens, all stuffed in the car together, tired and dirty. We eventually sat together and ate, but we didn't talk about what really happened that day. That day, my family made a small portion of peace with the past, and this time, I was lucky enough to be with them, out at the beach.

Click here to link to an article about the coastal cleanup. My parents are pictured in the image with the caption that reads, “At Beach 35 Street, recyclables had to be separated before bagging them", my mom is in the hat holding the garbage bag open, my dad is off to the left holding what looks like the moon in his hand.

less bio, same luminescence

I just started a new science blog on the nature network. So, I may be taking some of the occasional “bio” out of this blog and reserving this space for more personal anecdotes.

Here is the link.

http://blogs.nature.com/juliaz/2010/10/welcome_to_evolverie.html

Summery

Summer is wrapping up with a few last gorgeous moments here in New York city. But it wasn’t all roses this summer. It was hot roses. Although, we had a pretty damn good one, took many car trips to visit friends and family, went camping, got out to the beach, Joe saw a shark, I killed a huge cockroach/waterbug in our kitchen with boiling water, celebrated our 3rd wedding anniversary, brunches and coffees with dear friends, I forced Joe to watch Annie Hall, he forced me to watch Inception, our car was broken into, I am going to be an aunt (again), lovely jogs and walks in central park and along the hudson river, we fished, we picnicked, I overslept, we swam, we sweat, we ate chocolate pinkberry. But I cant wait for fall, it really is the best time in New York. And our air conditioner died this morning, it knew. Happy Labor Day Weekend everyone.

Blue Voodoo

“Its barely blue”, she muttered at me as I walked into the auditorium. She was standing too close and I was startled. I looked down at my own shirt, gave her a contrite a look, and continued walking. This was the first time the principal of my high school had spoken directly to me. I don’t think she knew my name. But she knew my shirt was not blue. It was a grey collared shirt, with only a hint of blue. I was, just barely, in uniform, which left me mostly out of uniform. Also, it was known, that blue was her very favorite color, she wore it every single god-given day.

A year later in my art class we were drawing and painting portraits. I wanted to do a portrait of our dear old wrinkly principal, who everyone seemed to love, but I really didn’t. It was uncharacteristically brown-nosey and gutsy for me to want to do this, but her face was so interesting. Also, at that point, I knew I was good. She would know my name now. I marched down to her office. She sat across from me in a chair, in her almost nuns habit, which was really just a habit of wearing the same color every day. I sketched her face, it seemed young and old at the same time, with tracks of disappointment running every which way across it. I was working quickly and nervously. Then, she moved her head. She was falling asleep in the chair. I didn’t say a thing. Maybe she needed a nap. Of course she needed a nap, poor old lady. I finished my drawing. It looked very much like her. We exchanged pleasantries.

I went upstairs to the art room to turn my drawing into a painting, one that would hang in her office for years to come. I would be famous. Sort of. I decided to paint her portrait in cool blue hues, because those were her favorite and because I had to do my blue contrition. I worked it and reworked it, with colors ranging from out-of-the-tube royal blue to the yellow-grey of a bird feather to soft metallic greens. Something was emerging. Something very strange. I put more paint on, painstakingly doing her eyes so they burned cold with equal intensity to her actual eyes. I stepped back to look at it. She looked very very ill in my painting. What had I done? I had particularly messed up her shoulders. Desperately, I cut the painting off at her neck. Now, I had a sick and intense blue head of my principal and it looked very much like her. I frantically pasted it on another piece of white paper. Then it looked something like her blue head on a plate, minus the plate. And maybe in the back of my mal-adjusted high school mind, that is just where I wanted her. That painting never saw another face, blue or otherwise.

Camping at Mongaup Pond

We went camping this weekend at Mongaup Pond, Livingston Manor, NY. Story to follow. Click on the photos to enlarge.

Paleontology and the Nucleotide New Wave

“There are two types of people in the world, those who divide the world into two types of people, and those who don’t. ” –Robert Benchley

As an evolutionary geneticist, the theoretical basis as to why I was at a paleontological field site in Kenya last summer is clear to me—but it’s not necessarily easy-to-explain-to-your-mother obvious. Here, I revisit the ideology that brought genetics and paleontology together and me to Africa:

In the 1930s, a few intrepid geneticists began to incorporate their ideas about the dynamics of living populations into a wider evolutionary framework, that included paleontology. And one paleontologist in particular, George Gaylord Simpson, was instrumental in forwarding the concepts from population geneticists into the minds, but probably not hearts, of paleontologists. What emerged was called “The Modern Evolutionary Synthesis”. It was an extension and refinement of Darwin’s way of understanding the natural world. It gave us a way of using gene frequencies in living populations to explain the formation of species diversity, both spatially and temporally.

One tenet of “The Synthesis” was that there is no inherent difference between the evolution that shapes living populations from generation to generation, and the evolution that has formed wildly different species forms over millions of years of geologic time. This was a big deal. Some scientists thought that population genetics was not enough to explain the vast discontinutites in the fossil record, that instead there was some kind of qualitative difference between these two modes of evolution. Today, we essentially agree that microevolution (or population genetics) begets macroevolution (or speciation). And its quite beautiful to envision forms unfolding this way, where staggering diversity emerges from the humble tick of constant gradual change.

Although we regularly reflect on this elegant theory, it is difficult to actively merge these two data types in a biologically meaningful way. There is a network of insurmountable complexity between one nucleotide being replicated imperfectly and causing a consequential mutation, to understanding a menagerie of fossil forms. Despite this, there are a few examples where these two data types are used in a synthetic way.

One way you might imagine that fossils and DNA dovetail is when DNA is still organically residing in the fossilized specimen. This is how the Neanderthal genome was able to be assembled. And recently, DNA was extracted from a fossil finger bone in Siberia which showed that it was an entirely new species that existed between 48,000 and 30,000 years ago. But there is a turning point, that is dependent on both time and the fossilization environment, where virtually all DNA leaves the building. When fossils are nucleotideless like this, it takes conceptual creativity to save them from careening into deep time, like stone dragons, decoupled from the dynamic flow of neontology.

Humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor approximately 6 million years ago. This common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor with gorillas approximately 8 million years ago. How do we arrive at these time estimates? We need both fossils and genes. The neutral theory of molecular evolution predicts that certain regions of the genome, which are not functionally constrained, mutate at a constant rate over time. Like a consistent ticking molecular clock through time, change, change, change, change. So, by evaluating how different the gene sequences are between two living species, we can estimate how much time has passed since they last shared a common ancestor. However, to accurately connect the genetic distance with time, we need to know how fast the clock ticks. Enter the fossils. Geneticists use fossils to calibrate the molecular clock. We use a fossil that, based on its suite of morphological characters, represents a putative common ancestor between two living lineages. The fossil is dated. This date is used to calibrate the clock. There are not enough fossils to fit neatly into every divergence point between all living species. So, we use one well dated and morphologically informative fossil to calibrate the clock and then all other nodes in the tree, or points of divergence, are inferred based on the genetic distance between the living species. It sounds crazy, and it is kind of crazy, but this is how its done.

When fossils are analyzed and allocated to taxonomic groups, there has to be a method to quantify difference between two specimens. To do this, something has to be known about how skeletal evolution may progress. For example, if a particular feature is measured on two fossil specimens, which differ, how do we know we are comparing equivalent features? Enter, you guessed it, genetics. But also please welcome, our marvelous friend, the study of development, or ontogeny. The study of evolutionary-development, or Evo-Devo, is another place where genetics and paleontology gracefully meet. There are two ways which evo-devo provides evo-info for paleo-bio. One way is that the genetic and developmental basis of skeletal features can tell us if two features, in two different species, are homologous and should be compared. Additionally, paleontologists interpret fossil morphology and ascribe adaptationist explanations to particular features (e.g. a bone like this was used for that function). Ideally, these explanations are grounded in an understanding of what features develop independently. One cannot necessarily say that fingers were shorter because they were used for x, because feet and hands are governed by a common developmental pathway, and maybe it was the feet that were under direct selection. So, selection for one feature can result in another feature just changing along with it, for no adaptive reason, but because they are developmentally linked.

Which brings me to my big idea, which I wanted to dream up while staring out at Lake Victoria last summer, but it didn’t quite happen that way. Hopefully, I can make a contribution to the field—through the paired study of population genetics and skeletal morphology—which will be truly applicable to paleontology. That is what I want. I want to synthesize my evolutionary cake, and eat it too.

The first scientists who brought about this New Synthesis were not only brilliant, they were tolerant and open to other ways of knowing. This is rare. Once you become a part of any group, you learn that there are subgroups and sub-beliefs within the larger group. The subgroups are rarely philosophically harmonious. It’s silly. In the case of evolutionary biology, its best to gather many independent lines of evidence to begin to answer questions about the past, which, we can all agree, is thrilling and mysterious and over.

Blog Post Outtakes:

Waiter, there is a fossil in my hypothesis.

Get your fossils out of my hypothesis.

say fossilized hypotheses five times, fast.

The thing about the genome is that it does not record the evolutionary losses. When an allele is detrimental to life and reproductive success, it is not maintained in the genomes of the members of a population. Fossils record more than that, they record the evolutionary successes and the losses, the winners and losers all fossilize, its all there, except that its not.

There are some lineages that lived in the past but have no living members today. Death is sad but can you imagine how tragic it was the day the last Parathropus died? or even his or her last lonely conspecificless weeks on earth! We do not think there are any direct members of this lineage still in existence. In an evolutionary sense, some deaths are not really ends, while some, heartbreakingly, are.