COUNTERFEIT SEX HORMONES • MESSENGERS FROM T H E S UN • WITCHES OF MEXICO

the

SCIENCES
PUBLISHED BIMONTHLY BY THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES •JANUARY /FEBRUARY 1996• $3.95

M ONKEY B USINESS
Creationists Regroup to Expel Evolution from the Classroom
by EUGENIE C. SCOTT
 THE

Sciences
COLUMNS

Anecdotal Evidence . N O C O N C E P T I O N
Masquerading as sex hormones, chemicals ubiquitous
J A N U A R Y / FE B R U A R Y 1 9 9 6 in the environment could threaten our children’s ability to reproduce
V OLUME 36/NUMBER 1 DIANA LUTZ

Works in Progress . T H E S H A D OW B OX E R
To trap neutrinos from the sun, Ray Davis has spent three decades
observing their ephemeral traces deep inside a mine. His results
could shed light on the future of the universe.
ROBERT ZIMMERMAN

ESSAYS & COMMENT

C O V E R S T O R Y

M ONKEY BUSINESS
Rebuffed in the courts, antievolutionists are seeking
a new niche in the schools, one classroom at a time
EUGENIE C. SCOTT

FEATURES

N O A S S E M B LY R E QU I R E D
Protein folding has perplexed generations of biochemists.
Now the problem may be about to yield.
GEORGE D. ROSE

On Common Ground . B ROT H E R S U N D E R T H E HAIR

The uneasy kinship between human and ape
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROSAMOND PURCELL
TEXT BY STEPHEN JAY GOULD

SHARDS OF SPEECH
The words you are reading are shrapnel from a five-thousand-year-old
cultural explosion. Archaeologists and linguists now think
they know where it erupted and who set it off.
DAVID W. ANTHONY

REVIEWS

S ORCERERS’ A PPRENTICE
In the underworld of Aztec shamans, an anthropologist uncovers
a viper’s nest of feuds, poisons and gleeful murder
GARY PAUL NABHAN

Books in Brief . CONFESSIONS OF A P Y RO M A N T I C

P L U S: Software disasters; vital statistics
LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL

DEPARTMENTS

Initial Conditions . Editor’s Notebook

Peer Review . Letters from Readers
Working Hypotheses . Headless Nails
RODNEY W. NICHOLS

Event Horizon . An arbitrary guide to cultural pursuits in the sciences

ON THE COVER: David Wojnarowicz, Quanta . Brain cells with a sense of direction; brave new worlds;
Fear of Evolution (detail), phaser beam; flip-top bugs; good news for oenophiles
1988–89
Strange Matter . New Year’s Resolutions in the Animal Kingdom
ROZ CHAST
 Anecdotal Evidence
Masquerading as sex hormones, chemicals ubiquitous
in the environment could threaten our children’s ability to reproduce
A
S RECENTLYAS 1960 INFERTILITY in
couples was, to put the matter del-
icately, not a top priority for the
medical establishment: it was a
women’s problem. Demographers rou-
tinely attributed the reproductive success
of a couple to the woman if the fertility of
the individuals was unknown. In other
words, if a couple tried and failed to have
children, the presumption was that the
woman was barren, not that the man was
sterile. In general, an infertile couple was
regarded as exceptional.
These days infertility is not so casually
dismissed. For one thing, the man falls un-
der suspicion as well. The evidence of the
past twenty years shows what, with hind-
sight, may always have been the case: that
the male is a contributing factor in a cou-
ple’s infertility 50 percent of the time—
sexual equality with a vengeance.
But more, there is a substantial and de-
veloping body of evidence for disturbing
trends in male reproductive health. For
example, increases have been document-
ed in the rate of testicular cancer and in
the number of boys born with urethral
abnormalities or undescended testicles.
According to some investigators, though
their assertions have been disputed, sperm
counts have declined by about a third in
the past twenty years—a rate of 2.1 per-
cent a year—and the quality of sperm,
measured by their morphology and motil-
ity, has declined as well. It is hard to resist
the conclusion that fertility itself is on the
wane. And whether or not fertility has de-
clined, it is now estimated that one in six
couples has trouble conceiving.
In some 25 to 40 percent of the cases of
male infertility, the syndrome has no
known cause. Recently the hypothesis has
been put forward that the decline in male
reproductive health, and the possible de-
cline in fertility, may be related to the pres-
ence in the environment of chemical com-
pounds that mimic or otherwise disrupt
the estrogens (the female sex hormones) or
the androgens (the male hormones).
One important argument in favor of
that hypothesis is the case of the drug
diethylstilbestrol (DES). DES is a synthetic
estrogen, which was prescribed to more
than five million women between the late
1940s and the early 1970s to prevent
DIANA LUTZ
No Conception
certain complications of pregnancy. The
effects of the drug on the health of the
daughters of those women have been
widely publicized. Its effects on their sons
are not so well known. In 1975 John A.
McLachlan, now director of the Tulane/
Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Re-
search in New Orleans, showed that ex-
posure to DES in utero altered the sexual
development of male mice. DES sons have
since been shown to have an increased risk
of reproductive disorders.
More recent research has demonstrated
that certain other chemicals, now com-
mon in the environment, bind to and trig-
ger or inhibit the activity of estrogen or
androgen receptors in the test tube. To
workers familiar with the effects of DES, it
came as no surprise that the same chemi-
cals also give rise to reproductive abnor-
malities, including low sperm counts, in
animals exposed to them during fetal and
neonatal development. Because of those
effects, the chemicals have become
known as endocrine disrupters, or, popu-
larly, “gender benders.”
The list of chemical suspects is incom-
plete, but it includes phthalates, which are
added to plastics to give them flexibility
and are also ingredients in paints, inks and
adhesives; alkyl phenols, which are prod-
ucts of the microbial breakdown of certain
ingredients of detergents, paints, herbicides
and cosmetics; and organochlorine pesti-
cides, including DDT, aldrin and dieldrin.
Those substances are everywhere.
Phthalates, for instance, occur in plumb-
ing pipes and in the plastic, paper and
cardboard common in food packaging. As
the endocrinologist John Sumpter of
Brunel University in Uxbridge, England,
notes, “You can’t have a Western life of
any sort at all without being exposed to
phthalates.” Alkyl phenols find their way
into surface waters and aquatic sediments,
and then accumulate in living organisms,
wherever detergents or cosmetics are
washed into the environment or paints or
herbicides leach into soil and ground-
water. And even though many organo-
chlorine pesticides were banned in the
West in the 1960s, they are still very much
with us. The half-life of DDT in the envi-
ronment varies, but it can exceed fifty
years. The current use of DDT in devel-
oping countries probably exceeds past lev-
els of its use in the developed world.
The evidence that such environmental
chemicals are agents of human infertility is
still largely circumstantial. There are still
many missing links in the causal chain that
would connect receptor binding to
changes in reproductive health to human
infertility. No one is more aware of those
missing links than the investigators work-
ing to forge them. But the general feeling
is that the evidence gained so far is too
plausible to ignore. Last summer an ecolo-
gist and a climatologist made a $15,000 bet
with an economist who maintains that en-
vironmentalists are painting a misleadingly
dark picture of the human condition. The
wager was that fifteen benchmarks of the
quality of life will grow worse in the next
ten years. One of those benchmarks was
the average count of human sperm.
T endocrine disrupters was triggered by
HE RECENT BURST OF RESEARCH ON
the observations of their effects in wildlife
or laboratory animals. In 1980 a small
chemical-mixing company spilled massive
amounts of sulfuric acid and DDT-laced
dicofol, a mitacide that is a close chemical
relative of DDT, into Lake Apopka, the
fourth-largest body of freshwater in
Florida. The volume of the spill is still not
known for certain, but two weeks after the
event investigators from the U.S. Envi-
ronmental Protection Agency (EPA), who
had been alerted by local residents, found
that water near the lake’s spring had a pH
of 1.7—roughly the pH of stomach acid.
Florida is renowned for alligator ranch-
ing. The ranchers, ever mindful of the
need to protect a multimillion-dollar in-
dustry, wanted to know how many wild
alligator eggs could be harvested without
damage to future populations. In 1986 the
Florida Game and Freshwater Fish Com -
mission asked Louis J. Guillette Jr., a pro-
fessor of zoology at the University of
Florida in Gainesville, to find out what
makes a good alligator egg.
Guillette and his colleagues began to
take an inventory of the hatching rates at
nest sites on the shores of seven Florida
lakes, including Apopka. The reproduc-
tive conditions of the alligators was in
general poorer than the investigators had
expected, but Lake Apopka was in a class
by itself. Nests along the lakeshore con-
tained an unusually large number of un-
hatched alligator eggs. Guillette and his
team followed the situation and in 1988,
the worst year, found that only 4 percent
of the eggs hatched.
Moreover, those alligators that did
hatch had problems that were likely to im-
pair their own ability to reproduce. The
testes of the males and the ovaries of the
females were abnormal. Measurements of
the levels of sex hormones in the hatch-
lings showed that in both sexes the estro-
gens had come to dominate. In females
the ratio of estradiol, the primary female
hormone, to testosterone, the male hor-
mone, was twice its normal value. In
males the ratio was even more abnormal;
levels of circulating testosterone were typ-
ical of females. As the hatchlings grew into
juveniles, the penises of the males were
notably reduced in size. Guillette con-
cluded that the chemical contamination
had somehow interfered with hormonal
instructions in the developing alligators.
M were stumbling onto similar evidence,
EANWHILE OTHER INVESTIGATORS
linking certain chemical pollutants to es-
trogenic or androgenic effects that inter-
fere with sexual differentiation and repro-
duction. William R. Kelce of the EPA’s
National Health and Environmental Ef-
fects Research Laboratory in Research
Triangle Park, North Carolina, says his re-
search on endocrine disrupters began
when his group received data on the
chemical vinclozolin from its manufac-
turer. The compound was being submit-
ted to EPA for testing in order to be regis-
tered as a fungicide for use on grapes. “We
noticed that there were problems with the
reproductive systems of the male [rat] pups
born in a multigenerational study,” Kelce
recalls. “We repeated the animal studies,
and we found that the development of the
male reproductive system was totally
female-like. When the male pups were
born, they had a very small anal–genital
distance, which is an androgen-dependent
measure, and the external genitalia of old-
er animals had female characteristics. We
had male rats with vaginal pouches and
many abnormalities of the penis.”
Those results suggested that vinclozolin
was inhibiting the action of the andro-
gens. For the male reproductive tract to
develop, a number of proteins have to be
synthesized, and that synthesis depends on
androgens secreted by the testes during
development. The androgens circulate in
the blood and freely enter cells. In the cells
of target organs, they bind to special pro-
teins that act as their receptors. By bind-
ing, they change the shape of the receptor
in such a way that it can, in turn, bind to
DNA. That coupling initiates a sequence
of events that results in the manufacture of
the proteins encoded by the genes.
After eliminating several other possibili-
ties Kelce’s team demonstrated that vinclo-
zolin interferes with androgens by binding
to the androgen receptor and preventing
the transcription of DNA. Whereas the
androgens normally act like keys that open
doors to reproductive development, vin-
clozolin acts like a key that jams in a lock.
THE PENISES
o f j u venile alligators
exposed to
“gender-bender” pollutants
were notably
reduced in size.
The EPA team was just finishing its
studies of vinclozolin when the team
members attended a symposium given by
Guillette. Guillette was still trying to fig-
ure out exactly why young male alligators
in Lake Apopka had suffered “severe de-
masculinization.” Kelce and his colleagues
were struck by the resemblance between
the alligators that had been exposed to
DDT and their own rat pups that had been
exposed to vinclozolin.
Back in their laboratory they repeated
the vinclozolin studies with DDT metabo-
lites. In a letter to the journal Nature last
summer they reported that p,p’-DDE, the
major persistent metabolite of DDT, has
little or no ability to bind to the estrogen
receptor. Instead it inhibits androgen
binding and thereby prevents the genes or-
dinarily activated by the androgen recep-
tor from being expressed. Animal studies
showed that it gives rise to abnormalities in
male reproductive development similar to
the ones generated by vinclozolin.
W of vinclozolin in his rat pups, John
HEN KELCE DISCOVERED THE EFFECTS
Sumpter had already been working on en-
vironmental estrogens for some time.
Sumpter originally set out to study vitello-
genesis, or the production of egg yolk, in
fishes. In female fishes the ovary makes
estradiol, which stimulates the liver to
make vitellogenin, or yolk protein. The
vitellogenin is carried by the blood from
the liver back to the ovary, where it is tak-
en up and stored in the eggs.
Sumpter was studying egg making not
because he expected to find anything amiss,
but because he was trying to understand
why animals vary in the number and size of
the eggs they produce. “But in the early
1980s,” Sumpter says, “we found that in
one or two places male fish, which we
were using as controls, had quite substan-
tial concentrations of vitellogenin in their
blood. We didn’t expect this, because vitel-
logenin production is stimulated by estro-
gen, and males don’t have any estrogen.
The site where the males had the highest
levels was half a mile downstream from a
sewage-treatment works, and one day, one
of us said, ‘I wonder whether it’s the con-
traceptive pill in the sewage effluent.’”
Sumpter’s group approached the British
government with its findings and suggest-
ed further study might be warranted. “To
our amazement,” he recalls, “the British
government got back to us. They said, in
effect, that they knew all about it.” There
had been reports of hermaphroditic fishes
in one or two rivers, and government in-
vestigators had been studying them since
the late 1970s. But no one had been aware
of the work because it was classified.
I sioned
N THE END THE GOVERNMENT COMMIS-
Sumpter’s group to study the
feminization of the fishes. To determine
how widespread the problem was, the
group placed male fishes in cages near
sewage outflows and studied the blood
level of vitellogenin in the exposed fishes.
According to Sumpter, “There’s no doubt
whatsoever. Every single effluent across
the whole of the U.K. that we’ve tested,
and we’ve tested quite a few, is estro-
genic.” He adds that he knows of similar
data from France and similar unpublished
data from Germany.
One goal of Sumpter’s group is to iden-
tify estrogenic chemicals present in
sewage effluent. To save time the group
has tested some chemicals known to be
prevalent in effluent for estrogenic activ-
ity. Sumpter’s student Susan Jobling re-
ported last June that nine of the twenty
common sewage contaminants she as-
sayed bind to estrogen receptors, and
three of the nine trigger the receptor’s
normal activity. Two of the three are
phthalates and the third is BHA, a com-
mon food preservative.
For the past two years Sumpter has also
been feeding information to Richard M.
Sharpe, a mammalian physiologist with the
Medical Research Council Reproductive
Biology Unit in Edinburgh, who is con-
sidered Great Britain’s leading expert on
sperm production. As The Sciences went to
press, Sharpe was about to publish a study
showing lowered sperm counts in rat pups
exposed in utero to estrogenic com-
pounds. Sumpter, a coauthor of the paper,
agreed to outline the main findings. He
says the study shows that when pregnant
rats are exposed to what most people
would consider quite low levels of estro-
genic chemicals (including two phtha-
lates), the male offspring have significantly
smaller testes than do control rats. “It’s not
a gross effect,” Sumpter says, “but it’s real,
and it leads to reduced sperm production
in [the exposed] rats.”
O disrupter hypothesis is Stephen Safe, a
NE CRITIC OF THE ENDOCRINE-
toxicologist at Texas A&M University in
College Station. “As far as we know,” Safe
says, “we take in two or three micrograms
a day of these so-called estrogenic pesti-
cides, but we take in about a million
micrograms a day of potentially estrogenic
bioflavonoids.” (The bioflavonoids are a
class of compounds that occur in many
fruits and are essential for the absorption
and metabolism of vitamin C.) “Both class-
es of compounds are weakly estrogenic,”
Safe says, “so I’d like someone to tell me
what the difference is.”
Sumpter responds, “I don’t have much
problem with anything that Safe’s saying,
but he misses some things.” One is that
the health effects investigators are worried
about occur not in the adult animal but in
the developing animal. It could be that
during that sensitive period, when andro-
gen levels are quite low, doses of estrogen
mimics or of anti-androgens that leave
adults apparently unruffled can do sub-
stantial harm.
Why should it matter whether a devel-
oping animal is exposed to synthetic or to
plant-derived hormones? First, the mech-
anisms protecting people against natural or
plant-derived hormones may be ineffec-
tive against synthetic ones. For example,
special sex-hormone-binding proteins
bind to natural estrogen in the blood, but
not to the synthetic estrogen DES (which
has caused the reproductive abnormalities
I mentioned earlier). The plant-derived
estrogens may stimulate the synthesis of
binding proteins. Since bound estrogen is
not physiologically active, the plant-
derived estrogens might thereby decrease
the concentration of available estrogen.
A second difference is that many of the
synthetic hormones are resistant to bio-
degradation, and so they accumulate in the
body. In contrast, natural or plant-derived
hormones are quickly metabolized and ex-
creted. The phthalates, the precursors to
the alkyl phenols, and DDT, for instance,
accumulate in body fat. The levels of
organochlorine compounds in women to-
day are ten times higher than their levels of
estrogen. The worry is that if the fat is bro-
ken down during pregnancy or lactation,
the fetus or suckling child might be ex-
posed to high concentrations of the chem-
icals at a time of great sensitivity.
Kelce’s EPA colleague L. Earl Gray Jr.
says that “one problem with Safe’s argu-
ment is that if everything he says is true, we
never would have had any problems with
estrogens in wildlife and domestic animals,
and we do. Most of Safe’s evidence for his
arguments comes from in vitro single-cell
assays that do not always correspond to
what’s going on in the whole animal.”
T diminishing is not new. According to
HE HYPOTHESISTHATSPERM QUALITY is
the British Medical Journal, it attracted some
attention in the 1970s, but the debate was
“temporarily silenced” by an article that
compared large-scale studies and records
from a New York laboratory. The same
criteria of patient selection and the same
analytical techniques had been used at the
laboratory for thirty years. No evidence of
a decline in sperm quality was detected.
Then, in 1992, a Danish team from the
National University Hospital in Copen-
hagen published in the British Medical Jour -
nal a meta-analysis of sixty-one studies,
published between 1938 and 1991, of se-
men quality in men without a history of
infertility. They noted that the average
sperm count had declined by more than 40
percent, to 66 million per milliliter in 1990
from 113 million per milliliter in 1940. As
Guillette told a congressional committee
during testimony about the endocrine dis-
rupters, “Every man in this room is half the
man his grandfather was.”
But partly because the Danish study
came to the attention of the popular press,
it was soon mired in controversy. As
Stephen Farrow of Middlesex University
in Enfield, England, put it in an editorial
in the British Medical Journal, “By the na-
ture of their work epidemiologists erect
hypotheses and invite others to test them
to destruction. They run a constant occu-
pational risk, that of being mistaken.”
O N E I N V E S T I G ATO R
told Congress,
“ E ve ry man in this room
is half the man
his gra n d father wa s. ”
When the dust had settled, two of the
study’s authors concluded that although
the data for the period from 1970 until
1990 were compatible with several inter-
pretations, a real decline in semen quality
had taken place between 1938 and 1991.
Controversy over the Danish study also
drew heightened attention to geographic
patterns in male reproductive health, and
particularly to the discrepancy between
Denmark and Finland. Danish men have
a fivefold increase in testicular cancer,
compared with their Finnish counterparts,
and their sperm counts are half those of
the Finns. Niels E. Skakkebæk of the Na-
tional University Hospital in Copen-
hagen, one of the authors of the Danish
study, is organizing a multinational study
of male reproductive health that will in-
clude teams in Denmark, Finland, France
and the United Kingdom.
Meanwhile another study was published
that left less room for argument. In Febru-
ary 1995 the New England Journal of Medicine
published a study covering twenty years of
donations at a sperm bank in Paris. The
French team found that the mean sperm
concentration had decreased, as I noted ear-
lier, by 2.1 percent a year, from 89 million
per milliliter in 1973 to 60 million per
milliliter in 1992. That study was harder
than the Danish one to dispute because the
way men were recruited for donations and
the method of semen analysis had remained
the same throughout the period.
But there are those who doubt even
that study. In an editorial in the same
journal, Richard J. Sherins of the Genet-
ics and IVF Institute in Fairfax, Virginia,
objected that the men were selected from
groups unrepresentative of the general
population and “differences in age, absti-
nence before semen analysis, ejaculatory
frequency, and the number of samples an-
alyzed per person were not controlled
for.”
S and particularly with its narrow focus
KAKKEBÆK ISIMPATIENT with the debate
on sperm counts. Such a focus, he main-
tains, is not biologically sound; the sperm
counts are only one of the many related in-
dicators of male reproductive health that
investigators are monitoring. For example,
the incidence of testicular cancer in the
United States has doubled among white
people and tripled among black people
since 1950. The point, says Skakkebæk, is
that the testicular abnormalities appear to
be linked. The risk of testicular cancer, for
instance, is higher in men with a history of
undescended testicles.
Writing in The Lancet, Sharpe and
Skakkebæk have argued that because tes-
ticular cancer, undescended testicles and
urethral abnormalities all are errors that
probably arise during fetal development,
those medical conditions and reduced
sperm counts may have a common cause.
Sharpe and Skakkebæk suggest that al-
tered exposure to estrogens during preg-
nancy is a likely candidate, in part because
of the similar abnormalities observed in
the sons of women exposed to DES.
One final complication: Suppose sperm
counts are indeed lower. Does that make
men less fertile? After all, it takes only one
sperm to fertilize an egg. Skakkebæk and his
colleagues say that sperm concentration has
been shown to correlate with male fertility.
But Sherin’s editorial asserts that data col-
lected by the National Center for Health
Statistics and the Princeton National Fertil-
ity Study indicate that rates of infertility
have remained constant for three decades.
According to Douglas T. Carrell of the
University of Utah School of Medicine in
Salt Lake City, who works with infertile
couples, it is hard to tell whether infertil-
ity has increased. Moreover, there are no
good historical data, because in the past
women discussed such matters privately
with their gynecologists.
I about the endocrine disrupters in the past
N SPITE OF THE WAVE OF PUBLICITY
year, most men are still unaware that their
reproductive health is under scrutiny.
Among those who have heard casual re-
ports about the endocrine disrupters, a
common response is that a decline in fertil- higher than the ones in a normal diet. But
ity is not a bad thing. As a friend of mine put vom Saal himself has recently done an an-
it, “the only command God has ever given imal study that indicates it is a very potent
that we have adequately fulfilled is be fruit- DES-like compound. “Chemicals that are
ful and multiply. We should give it a rest.” going to end up in our food need to be ex-
Why worry? Frederick S. vom Saal, a bi- amined for health effects,” he says, “not af-
ologist at the University of Missouri– ter but before they are placed in our food.
Columbia, gives two reasons. One is the
consequences of endocrine disruption.
We all have a stake in that.” •
“Look at congenital hypothyroidism,” he DIANA LUTZ is a freelance journalist based
says. “The consequences of abnormally low in Ames, Iowa, and an editorial associate of
levels of thyroid hormones include mental THE SCIENCES.
retardation and motor abnormalities, so
you’re talking about lifelong debilitation.”
There are chemicals in the environment
that resemble thyroid hormones, he con-
tinues, such as PCBs and dioxin. Although
no one yet knows whether those chemicals
are disrupting thyroid levels in humans, the
possibility “is nothing to laugh at.”
A second worry is that the methods
worked out for assessing risk from car-
cinogens are inappropriate when it comes
to endocrine disrupters. “The whole field
of toxicology,” vom Saal says, “grew out
of industry concern over high-dose expo-
sure of its workers. The goal was to pro-
tect against cancers that occur at extreme-
ly low frequency. The method people
came up with was to run one or two stud-
ies using exceedingly high doses, plot the
responses and then draw a straight line
down to some zero value. The assumption
was that this gave you some idea of the
risk at lower doses.
“This method is criticized even within
the cancer field,” vom Saal continues, “but
in the field of endocrine disrupters, there is
no argument about it whatsoever. It sim-
ply doesn’t work. That’s because there is
no linear response in endocrinology. The
response is shaped like an upside-down U.
At high doses you don’t get a response.
The first therapy for breast cancer was a
high dose of estrogen, because a high dose
of a hormone does exactly the opposite of
what a low dose does. It inhibits the sys-
tem. That means you can’t extrapolate
from a few high-dose studies, and that, in
turn, means no chemical in the environ-
ment today has been tested in a relevant
fashion for its endocrine-disrupting abili-
ty.”

V ment must take into account political,

OM SAAL CONCEDES THAT risk assess-

economic and moral considerations and so

extends beyond science. But for that very
reason, he argues, we all are stakeholders in
the debate; we all have to eat. “Most peo-
ple assume that if a chemical is in food, it’s
got to be safe,” he says. But there are many
chemicals in food that have never been
tested—indeed, many are nowhere even
listed as present. One example is BPA (bis-
phenol A), which occurs in many plastic
products, including the epoxy lining of
food cans. Only a few studies have looked
at the compound, vom Saal says, and those
have investigated its effects only at levels
 E s s ay s & C o m m en t
MONKEY BUSINESS
Rebuffed in the courts, antievolutionists are seeking
a new niche in the schools, one classroom at a time
BY EUGENIE C. SCOTT
RIENDLY, NEVADA, IS AN UNFRIENDLY TOWN
F in which to teach evolution. So reports a
teacher who says he faces disciplinary action
because his lessons mention Darwin.
Paradise, California, may be a paradise for conservative
Christians who want their children’s science education to
include an account of the origin of life based on the book
of Genesis. At a new charter school (a locally managed
school with relaxed curricular requirements) a sympathetic
board of directors has announced that it plans to let the cre-
ationist parents have their way. Similar schools in Orange,
California, and Berlin, Michigan, may soon follow suit.
Moon, Pennsylvania, was the site of some out-of-this-
world science teaching in March 1994. Parents sued the
district after a school-district administrator spent a day
telling students that the dinosaurs died out in Noah’s
Flood; that the diversity of human languages was divine
punishment inflicted on the builders of the Tower of Ba-
bel; and that creation “science” has shown that the earth is
only a few thousand years old, on the basis of the fall of,
yes, moon dust. The district settled the lawsuit, promising
not to advocate creationism in science classes again.
One hundred fourteen years after the death of Darwin,
seventy-one years after the Scopes trial and nine years af-
ter the Supreme Court struck down laws requiring equal
time for creation and evolution, the struggle over evolu-
tion in the schools is alive and well. As executive director
of the National Center for Science Education, I deal with
it daily, keeping an eye out for newly kindled brushfires of
controversy and giving information and advice to people
who want to ensure that unscientific “science” stays out of
the public schools. Some days it seems the telephone rings
almost nonstop with reports and complaints from around
the country: a state committee poised to slap antievolution-
ary warning labels on biology textbooks; a school board
abuzz with a new “scientific” theory called intelligent de-
sign; teachers bracing for the inevitable barrage of leaflets
when the Institute for Creation Research sends one of its
popular “Back to Genesis” roadshows to town.
The legal setbacks of the 1980s left their mark on the
antievolution movement. Now, instead of lobbying for
state laws to put creation “science” in the classroom, ad-
vocates have returned to the grass roots. By putting pres-
sure on local school boards and teachers, they try to make
evolution too hot to handle, or at least to sweep it into the
educational background. The low-profile approach has
paid off in a series of local victories—small, piecemeal and
sometimes short-term, but still troubling to anyone who
cares about science education in America. And there are
signs that the movement is again starting to flex its muscles
at the state level as well.
HAT MAKES WELL -MEANING PEOPLE FIGHT
W so hard to keep children from learning a
basic scientific principle? From the begin-
ning of the American antievolution movement, the driving
force has been the same: a struggle for souls. Students who
learn evolution, the creationists reason, will come to doubt
the existence of God. Without the moral rudder that
religion provides, they will become bad people doing bad
things. Evolution is thus evil and a cause of evil. As
Henry M. Morris, the most influential twentieth-century
creationist, wrote in 1963, “evolution is at the foundation
of communism, Fascism, Freudianism, social Darwinism,
behaviourism, Kinseyism, materialism, atheism and, in the
religious world, modernism and Neo-orthodoxy.”
In the early 1920s creationists succeeded in outlawing the
teaching of evolution in three American states. In Tennessee
in 1925, John T. Scopes was convicted of the crime of
teaching evolution. The Scopes trial was widely considered
a Pyrrhic victory for antievolution campaigners, but the en-
suing controversy largely kept evolution out of school text-
books for another thirty years. Only after the Sputnik scare
of 1957 did scientists begin writing textbooks that present-
ed evolution as the organizing principle of biology.
Antievolutionists were appalled. Adding to their woes,
in 1968 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Epperson v.
Arkansas, that it was illegal for states to ban the teaching of
evolution. Such bans, Justice Abe Fortas wrote, single out
evolution from the curriculum “for the sole reason that it
is deemed to conflict with a particular religious doctrine.”
Thus they violate the establishment clause of the First
Amendment to the Constitution: “Congress shall m a ke no
l aw re s p e c ting the establishment of religion, or prohibit-
ing the free exercise thereof.”
The ruling gave antievolutionists a new focus: if they
could reframe the biblical account of creation as a scientific
theory, the establishment clause would no longer apply.
Creationism could be taught in science classes, blunting the
evil effects of evolution. In the 1970s, laws requiring equal
time for creation “science” in public schools were proposed
in at least twenty-two states and were passed in two,
Arkansas and Louisiana. Both laws soon sparked lawsuits.
The Arkansas case, McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education,
hinged on the law’s point-by-point definition of creation
“science”:
Creation-science includes the scientific evidences [sic] and related
inferences that indicate: (1) Sudden creation of the universe, en-
ergy, and life from nothing; (2) The insufficiency of mutation and
natural selection in bringing about development of all living kinds
feet of dust. Yet astronauts had left footprints only a few inch-
es deep. Thus the solar system must be no more than a few
thousands of years old—too young for evolution to have tak-
en place. (Satellite measurements have shown that the article
vastly overestimated the fall of cosmic dust. Moon dust, how-
ever, remains a creationist mainstay.)

O
THER CREATIONIST ALIASES INCLUDE
from a single organism; (3) Changes only within fixed limits of “abrupt appearance theory” (coined by
originally created kinds of plants and animals; (4) Separate ances- Wendell R. Bird, the creationists’ legal
try for man and apes; (5) Explanation of the earth’s geology by strategist in the Arkansas trial) and “intelligent-design the-
catastrophism, including the occurrence of a worldwide flood; ory” (promoted by two biology professors: Percival W.
and (6) A relatively recent inception of the earth and living kinds.
Davis of Hillsborough Community College in Tampa,
The obvious similarities to Genesis proved to be the Florida, and Dean H. Kenyon of San Francisco State Uni-
law’s downfall. In January 1982 the federal district court versity in California). Intelligent-design theory (ID theory)
judge William R. Overton ruled that creation “science” is a lineal descendant of the “argument from design” pro-
was religion, not sci- pounded in 1802 by the
ence. “A scientific theo- “A S C I E N T I F I C T H E O RY M U S T B E T E N TAT I V E English theologian
ry must be tentative and William Paley in his
always subject to revi- and always subject to revision,” book Natural Theology. If
sion or abandonment in the federal judge wrote. you find a watch on the
light of facts that are in- ground, Paley argued,
consistent with, or falsi- Creation “science” did not qualify. you naturally conclude
fy, the theory,” he wrote. not that it assembled it-
“A theory that is by its self by chance but that a
own terms dogmatic, absolutist and never subject to revi- watchmaker made it. Analogously, the intricacy of nature
sion is not a scientific theory.” The state did not appeal his must be the work of an omniscient designer, the God of the
decision. Bible. Modern ID theory equates evolution with chance
and argues that intricacy must arise from design—though

T
HE LOUISIANA CASE, EDWARDS V. AGUILLARD,
went all the way to the Supreme Court. In
1987 the court reaffirmed that creationism is
inherently a religious concept and that advocating it in pub-
lic schools would violate the establishment clause. Discus-
sions of creationism would still be permitted in other con-
texts, such as comparative religion classes.
But the devil is in the details: the Edwards decision seemed
to leave a loophole, which antievolutionists have exploited.
Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote, in his opinion, that
“teaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of
humankind to schoolchildren might be validly done with the
clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science
instruction.” In a dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that
“the people of Louisiana, including those who are Christian
fundamentalists, are quite entitled, as a secular matter, to have considered approving it for classroom use; both rejected it.
whatever scientific evidence there may be against evolution
presented in their schools, just as Mr. Scopes was entitled to
present whatever scientific evidence there was for it.”
Whether Justice Scalia knows it or not, “scientific evi-
dence against evolution” is one of the euphemisms anti-
evolutionists have devised to avoid referring to creation. Au-
thors of creation-“science” literature comb scientific journals
for supposed anomalies, then laboriously construe them as
suggesting that evolution never took place. The presenter in
Moon, Pennsylvania, for instance, cited a thirty-four-year-
old article from Scientific American on the amount of mete-
oritic dust falling to earth and, ignoring the much weaker
pull of lunar gravity, concluded that the same amount must
fall on the moon. If the moon were billions of years old, he
asserted, its surface should be covered with several hundred
for establishment-clause purposes it leaves the designer un-
named.
The best-known statement of ID theory is Of Pandas and
People, which Davis and Kenyon published in 1989 as a
supplement for high school biology courses. Its theme is
that natural selection of random adaptive variations cannot
explain the structural complexity of living things. As evi-
dence, the book cites examples such as the structures of the
DNA double helix and of the protein cytochrome-c, as well
as sophisticated-sounding (if misapplied) ideas from infor-
mation theory. Apart from a passing reference in the intro-
duction, it does not mention creationism or a creator.
Scientists have found Of Pandas and People to be riddled
with inaccuracies, and teachers have found it pedagogical-
ly inadequate. At least two states, Alabama and Idaho, have
After those setbacks the publisher, the Foundation for
Thought and Ethics in Richardson, Texas, sent out mail-
ings encouraging a “quiet ar my” of parents and other cit-
izens to take the book directly to local teachers and school
boards. Communities where it has popped up for consid-
eration include Vista, California; Richland, Washington;
Louisville, Ohio; and Plano, Texas.
HAT IS WRONG WITH “ALTERNATIVES TO
W evolution”? With “evidence against
evolution”? Why not let students hear
all sides of a controversy and decide for themselves?
Wouldn’t that improve their skills in critical thinking?
Certainly it would—in principle. But surely a good crit-
ical-thinking exercise ought to deal with issues that are ac-
tually in contention. Evolutionary mechanisms, rates and
phylogenies all are being debated in science; whether evo-
lution took place is not. Even if it were a live issue, proper-
ly evaluating the literature on evolution would take far more
scientific knowledge (to say nothing of vocabulary) than
most secondary school students possess. No one would ask
a ninth-grader to decide whether a physician should use by-
pass surgery or balloon angioplasty to treat a patient with
clogged arteries. Yet medicine is only a branch of biology,
whereas evolutionary theory ranges across biology, geology,
astronomy, physical anthropology and other scientific disci-
plines. In my opinion, using creation and evolution as top-
ics for critical-thinking exercises in primary and secondary
schools is virtually guaranteed to confuse students about
evolution and may lead them to reject one of the major
themes of science.
At least critical-thinking exercises give students some ex-
posure to evolution. Many teachers simply avoid the sub-
ject altogether. Others go further, acting on their own ini-
tiative to teach creationism or straw-man distortions of
evolution. As I write, an even more pernicious assault on
evolution is just starting to unfold. Early in November
1995 the Alabama board of education ordered that all bi-
ology textbooks in public schools carry inserts labeled “A
Message from the Alabama State Board of Education”:
This textbook discusses evolution, a controversial theory some
scientists present as a scientific explanation for the origin of liv-
ing things, such as plants, animals and humans.
No one was present when life first appeared on earth. There-
fore, any statement about life’s origins should be considered as
theory, not fact.
The word “evolution” may refer to many types of change.
Evolution describes changes that occur within a species. (White
moths, for example, may “evolve” into gray moths.) This proc-
ess is microevolution, which can be observed and described as
fact. Evolution may also refer to the change of one living thing
to another, such as reptiles into birds. This process, called
macroevolution, has never been observed and should be consid-
ered a theory. Evolution also refers to the unproven belief that
random, undirected forces produced a world of living things.
There are many unanswered questions about the origin of life
which are not mentioned in your textbook, including:
• Why did the major groups of animals suddenly appear in the
fossil record (known as the “Cambrian Explosion”)?
• Why have no new major groups of living things appeared in
the fossil record for a long time?
• Why do major groups of plants and animals have no transi-
tional forms in the fossil record?
• How did you and all living things come to possess such a
complete and complex set of “instructions” for building a living
body?
Study hard and keep an open mind. Someday, you may con-
tribute to the theories of how living things appeared on earth.
The charge that evolution is “an unproven belief ”; the ref-
erences to changeless “groups” of organisms and to the sup-
posed absence of transitional forms between them; the de-
liberate confusion of the scientific use of “theory” (an
explanatory system) with the popular meaning (guess or
hunch); even the ironic plea for openmindedness—all of that
is straight from the arguments-against-evolution school of
creation “science.” The next few months will tell whether
Alabama’s warning labels are an isolated aberration or the first
wave in a new nationwide campaign.
ACED WITH SUCH MISGUIDED FERVOR, SCIENTIF-
F ically minded people often react with bafflement
and disbelief. Attack evolution? You might as
well try to repeal the heliocentric model of the solar system!
American school systems, however, are far from the forefront
of scientific thought, and in many of them, I can attest, the
skirmishing is intense. To anyone who shares my concern
about the future of science education in America, I say Wel-
come, and I offer the following pieces of advice.
• Get Inv olved. Fifteen years ago professional scientists
descended upon statehouses to testify against equal-time
laws. Now the action has shifted to school districts, schools
and teachers—the level at which, in American public edu-
cation, the most crucial decisions are made. Scientifically
trained people can play a key role, keeping an eye on their
local schools and stepping in to remind school boards and
the broader community of the facts: that the courts have
ruled that creation “science” is not science and does not be-
long in the science curriculum; and that evolution is a sol-
id component of scientific thought and not, as the title of a
popular antievolution book has it, “a theory in crisis.”
A little information can go a long way. Many school
boards still have not heard that teaching creationism as sci-
ence is unconstitutional. Others may plan to flout the law,
but they back off once they find out about the possible
consequences. In 1994, for instance, in Merrimack, New
Hampshire, members of the National Center for Science
Education were outraged to hear that their local school
board was thinking about introducing creationism into
school curriculums. I advised them to demand that the
school board consult its legal counsel; the case law is so
clear that any lawyer would advise against teaching cre-
ationism. The controversy galvanized the community into
turning out in record numbers to vote for moderates dur-
ing the spring 1995 election.
• Avoid De bates. If your local campus Christian fellow-
ship asks you to “defend evolution,” please decline. Public
debates rarely change many minds; creationists stage them
mainly in the hope of drawing large sympathetic audiences.
Have you ever watched the Harlem Globetrotters play the
Washington Federals? The Federals get off some good shots,
but who remembers them? The purpose of the game is to
see the Globetrotters beat the other team.
And you probably will get beaten. In such a forum, sci-
entific experts often try to pack a semester-long course into
an hour, hoping to convey the huge sweep of evolution, the
towering importance of its ideas, the masses of evidence in
its favor. Creationist debaters know better. They come well
prepared with an arsenal of crisp, clear, superficially
attractive antievolutionary arguments—fallacious ones, yes,
but far too many for you to answer in the time provided.
Even if you win the debate in some technical sense, most of
the audience will still walk away from it convinced that your
opponent has a great new science that the schools should hear
about. Teachers have enough problems. Above all else, do no
harm.
• Pr eser ve the Middle Gr ound. Antievolutionist orga-
nizations insist that one can be either an evolutionist or a scientists who are also devout have to “check [their] brains
Christian, not both. Such an all-or-nothing approach makes at the church house door.” Clearly the writers agree with
tactical sense: Polls have shown that 86 percent of Americans creationists that there can be no middle ground between sci-
identify themselves as Christians, and most of them do not ence and religion. To them I can only say: Most Americans
know or care much about evolution. (A Gallup poll taken in have already made their choice to be religious. Now you
1993 showed that nearly half of adult Americans agree with must choose which you prefer—a religious population that
the statement, “God created human beings pretty much in accepts evolution or a religious population that rejects it—
their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or
so.”) Forced to choose between religious faith and a badly
and decide what you can do to make that choice a reality. •
understood scientific principle, will the public choose evolu- EUGENIE C. SCOTT is executive director of the National Center for
tion? I doubt it. Science Education, a nonprofit membership organization in Berke -
But that choice is based on a false dichotomy. Some of ley, California, that supports the teaching of evolution and opposes
the strongest criticism of creation “science” has come from the advocacy of creation “science.”85
mainstream Christian denominations, which hold that evo-
lution is part of God’s plan. In McLean v. Arkansas Board of
Education, the lead plaintiff, William McLean, was a
Methodist minister; his supporters included clergy from the
Episcopal, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Southern Baptist
and African Methodist Episcopal churches, as well as the
American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish
Congress. The true dichotomy is between biblical literalists
and nonliteralists, not between religion and science.
Stripped to its essentials, the difference between creation
and evolution boils down to a question of history: Does the
universe have a history, or was everything in it created as is,
all at once? Evolutionists recognize the evidence that stars,
galaxies, geological features and living things are different
today from what they were in the past; creationists deny it.
It is true that evolutionary theory makes no reference to
the supernatural. Like all science, it is naturalistic: it answers
questions about the material or natural world using only ma-
terial explanations. Problems arise when people confuse two
distinct kinds of naturalism. Methodological naturalism simply
requires that, in trying to explain any particular observation
or experimental result, an investigator may not resort to mir-
acles. It is the frame of mind that all scientific workers adopt
on the job, and centuries of progress has shown its value.
Philosophical naturalism asserts that the material world is all
that exists—that there is nothing supernatural, no God or
gods, no creator, no creation. Many people with science
backgrounds describe themselves as philosophical naturalists,
but many do not. Gregor Mendel decoupled method-
ological from philosophical materialism, and so do other
scientists today.

deepest fears of conservative

O
NE OF THE
Christians—and a powerful motivator in
their fight against evolution—is the specter
of a teacher who concludes a lesson on evolution by say-
ing, in effect, “So much for your religion!” In my experi-
ence, such occurrences are next to nonexistent in primary
and secondary schools, and they are rare in universities. My
own position is that advocating a nontheistic philosophy in
the science classroom is just as wrong and just as unscien -
tific as advocating creationism is.
Being a philosophical materialist myself, I take some
lumps for being so conciliatory. I sometimes get heated let-
ters and E-mail echoing the sentiments of William B.
Provine, a biology professor at Cornell University, who
wrote in the September 5, 1988, issue of The Scientist that
 Works in Progress
The Shadow Boxer
To trap neutrinos from the sun, Ray Davis has spent three decades observing their ephemeral traces
deep inside a mine. His results could shed light on the future of the universe.
T
HE YEAR WAS 1952. ABOUT ONCE a
month Raymond Davis Jr. would
load a fifty-five-gallon drum onto a
hand truck and wheel it out to a
manicured lawn less than fifteen feet from
the graphite nuclear reactor at the
Brookhaven National Laboratory on
Long Island, New York. Davis would de-
posit the tank—filled with carbon tetra-
chloride (CCl4), an ordinary but toxic
cleaning fluid—on the lawn and walk
away. There it would rest undisturbed,
until Davis returned a few weeks later. He
would then reload the drum onto his hand
truck, take it back to the chemistry build-
ing and run a set of complicated tests on
the fluid.
Now, forty-three years later, Ray Davis
takes me for a tour of a successor to his
fifty-five-gallon drum. I meet him, a soft-
spoken, grandfatherly man wearing a hard
hat and a miner’s lamp, at a vast working
gold mine known as Homestake in Lead,
South Dakota. To reach the full-scale ex-
periment you board a mine elevator called
the cage, a small, five-by-ten-foot space
running on vertical wooden railings and
hauled up and down a 4,850-foot shaft
with steel cables. The cage shakes and
rattles vigorously as it drops deeper than
three times the height of the Empire State
Building, taking at least three minutes to
reach the 4,850-foot level.
Once you exit the elevator you walk
about a hundred yards along a mine pas-
sageway, with train tracks cut into its rock
floor. The faint twinkle of train headlights
in the distance makes the length of the
passage seem unmeasurable, and the soft,
deep rumble of ore being loaded into train
cars can always be heard in the back-
ground. A right turn at the first intersec-
tion quickly takes you beyond the air-
conditioning vents, and the temperature
rises above eighty degrees Fahrenheit.
There in the passage is what seems to be a
small chemical laboratory, old personal
computers lining one wall, arrays of glass
test tubes lining another.
To the left is a side passage, angling
steeply downward. At its bottom, about a
mile below the surface, is the tank cham-
ber, a room the size of a two-story house,
filled with a gray tank nearly forty-eight
ROBERT ZIMMERMAN
feet long and more than thirty feet in di-
ameter, which holds 100,000 gallons of
the dry-cleaning fluid tetrachloroethylene
(C2Cl4). Puddles of muddy, rust-colored
water lap at the base of the tank. White
and red crystal formations have grown
along the edges of the tank in the three
decades since its construction. Every oth-
er month Ray Davis and his associates
come down here to squeeze a minute
quantity of argon-37, fifteen atoms on av-
erage, out of the tank.
I Davis
N A SENSE, LITTLE HAS CHANGED FOR
since 1952. His quest, now as
then, is to capture the neutrino, at once
one of the most plentiful elementary
particles in the universe and one of the
most fleeting. Neutrinos were created in
copious quantities in the big bang, and
they can be generated today in nuclear
reactions and atomic bombs. They have
also played a fundamental role in helping
particle physicists determine the nature of
quarks and the so-called weak force.
Moving at or near the speed of light, the
minute particles bear no electric charge,
and they are not subject to the so-called
strong nuclear force, which binds protons,
neutrons and the quark constituents of
those particles in the atomic nucleus.
In fact, alone among elementary parti-
cles, neutrinos “feel” only the weak force,
which makes them interact, literally, only
weakly with other matter. To appreciate
just how weakly, according to calculations
made in 1934 by the physicist Hans A.
Bethe, now of Cornell University, and the
late English theoretical physicist Rudolf
E. Peierls, a column of water 1,000 light-
years thick would be needed to capture
most of the neutrinos generated in the so-
called beta decay of radioactive nuclei.
Ten thousand billion neutrinos from the
sun pass unnoticed through your body ev-
ery second of the day, and most of them
speed on through the rest of the mass of
the earth as if they were, as John Updike
once put it, “like dustmaids down a drafty
hall/ Or photons through a sheet of glass.”
T fying their existence in the first place
HUS DETECTING NEUTRINOS AND VERi-
was an achievement of the first rank. On
my descent into the mine with Davis last
October we both were keenly aware that
only days before, the Royal Swedish
Academy of Stockholm had announced
the winners of the 1995 Nobel Prize in
physics, and sharing that prize was the first
man to detect the neutrino. It was not
Davis. But if Davis felt any pangs of envy,
he did not show it; the race he ran four
decades ago against Frederick Reines of
the University of California at Irvine and
the late Clyde L. Cowan Jr. had long since
been lost, and it is Reines who now basks
in (much deserved) glory.
But Davis, too, has been able to bask,
in a fantastic kind of sunlight that is virtu-
ally unshaded by the mile of South Dako-
ta stone over our heads. For nearly thirty
years he has come down here regularly to
monitor his tank for evidence of neutrinos
from the sun. Indeed, Davis’s huge bottle
of cleaning fluid buried deep in the
Homestake Gold Mine is a new kind of
telescope, a neutrino telescope, capable of
“seeing” deep into the sun’s interior and,
in principle, recording information that
would affect theories of cosmological
phenomena from supernovas to the big
bang. Those data have proved to be sur-
prising, frustrating and immensely invigo-
rating, challenging physicists and as-
tronomers in directions unplanned and
unexpected. Davis’s data have thrown the
theory of solar burning into a decades-
long crisis that is still not resolved. And his
data are consistent with the finding, re-
ported late last year, that the neutrino may
possess a minute mass, not more than one
hundred thousandth the mass of the elec-
tron. If so, the so-called standard model of
elementary particles, which predicts a
neutrino mass of zero, has some explain-
ing to do. And if neutrinos have a nonzero
mass, they are so plentiful that the mass of
all the neutrino “dark matter” in the uni-
verse may be at least double the mass of all
visible matter, substantially shaping the
evolution of the universe and, perhaps,
one day helping end its expansion.
T first postulated in 1930, in a letter writ-
HE EXISTENCE OF THE NEUTRINO WAS
ten by the Austrian-born American physi-
cist Wolfgang Pauli to the Austrian-born
Swedish physicist Lise Meitner and other
physicists assembled for a conference in
Tübingen, Germany. In his letter Pauli
proposed what was then a merely hypo-
thetical particle to make up for what was
believed to be the nonconservation of en-
ergy, momentum and “spin,” or intrinsic
angular momentum, of atomic nuclei in
beta decay. But even Pauli was unhappy
with that kind of solution; he regarded it
as a “desperate way out” of the theoreti-
cal difficulties.
One measure of Pauli’s dissatisfaction
was the seeming impossibility of finding
experimental evidence for his newly postu-
lated particle. Even in hindsight today, it
strains credulity that any scientist believed it
possible to record evidence of the neutrino,
given its astonishingly ephemeral nature.
But in the 1940s, when the first nuclear re-
actors were built, physicists realized they
had a potential source of neutrinos many
orders of magnitude more intense than nat-
urally radioactive sources. That realization
is what brought Davis to Brookhaven in
1948. According to the theory of the day,
the Brookhaven reactor was generating vast
numbers of neutrinos, and Davis had a sim-
ple strategy for detecting them: If enough
neutrinos of a certain kind were to pass
through the chlorine in the cleaning fluid,
some of them would collide with some of
the chlorine atoms and convert the chlorine
to atoms of argon-37. (It takes 1042 neutri-
nos to ensure a reasonable chance of a col-
lision with a chlorine atom.) Extracting and
measuring the argon-37 atoms would
prove the existence of neutrinos and give a
measure of their flux.
Davis’s first attempt to measure neutri-
nos by chlorine decay, however, was
crude at best. “Not surprisingly, I got a
null result,” he remembers. For one thing,
neutrinos are not the only particles that
can transmute chlorine-37 into argon-37.
The subatomic debris generated by the
cosmic rays bombarding the upper atmo-
sphere from space swamped any neutrino
reactions his tank of cleaning fluid might
have recorded. Moreover, as Davis had
strongly suspected, the fifty-five-gallon
drum was simply not large enough. Too
few neutrinos would collide with too few
chlorine atoms, giving rise to too few ar-
gon-37 atoms for Davis to measure.
I He enlarged the tank to 1,000 gallons
N 1954 DAVISTRIEDSOMETHINGBIG ger.
and had it buried about twenty feet down
in the same grassy lawn at Brookhaven,
this time isolating the tank from all cosmic
radiation except for highly penetrating
muons. Davis had the staff glass blowers at
Brookhaven build him a portable chem-
istry set that he could wheel to the tank.
“I set up my family camping tent around
my equipment and did my tests there,
right above the tank.”
Yet even the 1,000-gallon tank wasn’t
large enough to register any argon-37
transmuted by neutrinos from the sun. In
a paper published in 1955 Davis explained
that although he was now able to extract
and measure as few as seventy argon-37
atoms a day from the tank, he had found
none. Solar neutrinos, if they existed at all,
had to be generating argon-37 atoms at an
even lower rate. Because the highest pre-
dicted value for the flux of solar neutrinos
would produce no more than a twentieth
of an argon-37 atom a day in a 1,000-gal-
lon tank, one critic pooh-poohed Davis’s
conclusions: “One would not write a sci-
entific paper describing an experiment in
which an experimenter stood on a moun-
tain and reached for the moon, and con-
cluded that the moon was more than eight
feet from the top of the mountain.”
Davis was not disheartened. The race
was still on to detect neutrinos from any
source, not just from the sun. In 1956 he
had two 500-gallon tanks installed at the
Savannah River plant in Georgia. Because
the tanks were placed beside a more pow-
erful reactor as well as shielded from most
cosmic-ray particles by the reactor’s con-
crete building, Davis hoped that now at
least a few neutrinos from the reactor
would smash against his chlorine and con-
vert it to a measurable amount of argon-37.
Ironically, at the same moment that
Davis was in Savannah, Reines and Cow-
an were there running their own neutrino
experiment. Instead of carbon tetrachlo-
ride, their tank was filled with dissolved
cadmium chloride and water. According
to theory, a small number of neutrinos
would interact with a small number of
protons in the water, splitting each proton
into a positron and a neutron. The
positron would almost immediately col-
lide with an electron, and the two parti-
cles would disintegrate into two gamma
rays, leaving the scene of the collision in
DAV I S BA S K S
in a fantastic
kind of sunlight
that is virt u a l ly unshaded
by the mile of stone
o ver our heads.
opposite directions. The neutron, howev-
er, would persist, on average, about five
microseconds before it would be captured
by the cadmium dissolved in the water.
The energy liberated by the capture
would appear as further gamma rays. If
Reines and Cowan could record the
emission of gamma rays with the distinc-
tive five-microsecond delay, they would
prove the existence of neutrinos.
Even as the experimenters carried on
their friendly competition at Savannah,
theorists were rewriting the rules. In 1956
Tsung-Dao Lee of Columbia University
in New York and Chen Ning “Frank”
Yang of the Institute for Advanced Study
in Princeton, New Jersey, proposed—and
Chien-Shiung Wu of Columbia Univer-
sity proved—that some subatomic nucle-
ar reactions could be left-handed or right-
handed, not symmetrical as had been
thought. That work predicted that the
Savannah nuclear reactor would give rise
only to antineutrinos, the antiparticles to
neutrinos. Antineutrinos cannot cause
chlorine decay, and so Davis’s two 500-
gallon tanks had nothing to measure from
the reactor. Again he had a null result.
Reines and Cowan, however, were
luckier. Their experiment could and did
measure the effects of antineutrinos. More
than four decades later that experiment
led to Reines’s Nobel Prize.
U success,
NFAZED BY REINES AND COWAN’S
Davis had his 1,000-gallon
tank moved to a limestone mine in Ohio,
where he had it placed more than 2,300
feet below the surface. Now the cleaning
fluid was tetrachloroethylene, less toxic
than carbon tetrachloride but just as
cheap. The tank was shielded from all but
the rarest high-energy muons, and the
chlorine would therefore react almost ex-
clusively with neutrinos from the sun.
Physicists had long theorized that the
sun’s basic nuclear processes could be di-
vided into two reactions, the proton-
proton chain (pp) and the carbon-nitrogen-
oxygen cycle (CNO). Each would generate
neutrinos in huge numbers but at differing
energies. Until 1958 it was assumed that
only the CNO cycle would create neutri-
nos with an energy high enough to react
with chlorine and create argon-37. But be-
cause the CNO cycle gives rise to less than
2 percent of the sun’s energy, Davis could
not build a tank large enough to measure
those neutrinos. Again the 1,000-gallon
tank produced no argon-37.
In 1958, however, Harry D. Holmgren
and R. L. Johnston of the Naval Research
Laboratory in Washington, D.C., discov-
ered that the pp chain, producing almost
98 percent of the sun’s energy, is more
complicated than anyone had thought.
Among the nuclear reactions in the chain
were some, specifically involving berylli-
um-7 and boron-8, that would give rise to
neutrinos energetic enough to react with
chlorine. If those reactions were added to
the known CNO cycle, a chlorine tank
substantially larger than 1,000 gallons but
still of practical size would be able to de-
tect the neutrinos from the sun.
Davis was now confident that for
$600,000 he could build the world’s first
“neutrino telescope,” one that would sure-
ly see the neutrinos pouring out of the sun’s
core. First he would expand the size of the
tank a hundredfold, from 1,000 to 100,000
gallons. Then he would bury the telescope
even deeper underground, to further shield
it from cosmic rays, reducing the unwant-
ed high-energy muon collisions to approx-
imately one every three weeks.
Many astrophysicists were enthusiastic
about the possibility. William A. Fowler
of the Kellogg Radiation Laboratory at
the California Institute of Technology,
one of the physicists who had worked out
the details of the pp chain and the CNO
cycle, threw his complete support behind
Davis, helping him get the necessary
funds. If the experiment worked, Fowler
said, people could for the first time “see”
inside the core of a star.
T then at Caltech, was also keenly inter-
HE ASTROPHYSICIST JOHN N. BAHCALL,
ested in the results of Davis’s experiment,
having dedicated several years of his life
to calculating the number of neutrinos
generated by the sun in its internal nucle-
ar reactions. According to Bahcall’s well-
respected estimates, Davis would measure
between two and six atoms a day of ar-
gon-37 out of a tank containing approxi-
mately 2.2 × 1030 atoms of chlorine. If that
prediction was borne out, Bahcall’s theo-
ry of the nuclear burning processes in the
sun would be confirmed.
Understandably, there was skepticism.
As Reines noted in 1960, “the probability
of a negative result even with detectors of
thousands or possibly hundreds of thou-
sands of gallons of CCl4 tends to dissuade
experimentalists from making the at-
tempt.” Even if Davis’s more optimistic
prediction—between four and eleven ar-
gon-37 atoms a day—turned out to be
right, the tank would still capture an un-
godly small number of neutrinos.
In the end, however, the project was ap-
proved, partly on the basis of Davis’s repu-
tation as a skilled and reliable experimenter,
partly because of the support of men such
as Fowler and Bahcall. With funding from
the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, the
world’s first neutrino telescope was built
between 1965 and 1967 in the Homestake
Gold Mine.
A gold. Argon-37 began to trickle out
T HOMESTAKE, DAVIS FINALLY struck
of the cavernous underground tank, al-
beit too slowly to fulfill Bahcall’s predic-
tions. In its nearly thirty years of opera-
tion, Homestake has routinely measured
an average rate of approximately one-half
an argon-37 atom a day, well below the
predicted number. Even now, after re-
fining their solar models significantly,
astrophysicists estimate that Davis’s tank
should measure no fewer than 1.5 argon-
37 atoms a day, three times what the tank
has found. The Homestake data have also
withstood the healthy skepticism of sci-
ence, having now been confirmed by
three other neutrino telescopes, all of
them much larger and more sophisticat-
ed than Davis’s.
The solar neutrino problem has be-
come one of the most celebrated anoma-
lies in all of physics, and it has caused the
solar theorists no little inconvenience. If
the models of the nuclear reactions of the
sun are wrong, almost all cosmological
theory for the past thirty years could be
misguided. From the predicted age of the
universe to the life and death of individu-
al stars, astrophysicists and cosmologists
F O R $600,000 DAV I S C O U L D BU I L D
the world’s first “neutrino telescope,” one that would
see the neutrinos pouring out of the sun’s core.
might find their hard-won hypotheses to
be as fleeting as the neutrino itself.
Davis’s finding that the flux of neutri-
nos from the sun is lower than expected
has also cast doubt on the assumption,
made, as I noted earlier, by the standard
model, that the neutrino has no mass. But
his low results could be accounted for if
neutrinos oscillate among the three neutri-
no species—the so-called electron, muon
and tau neutrinos. Such an oscillation
would imply that at least one of the species
has a nonzero mass. But because his detec-
tor would not pick up all three species,
Davis’s apparent low detection rate could
be caused by just such an oscillation. A
group of physicists working at the Los
Alamos National Laboratory in New
Mexico in October published results con-
firming neutrino oscillations and postulat-
ing a neutrino of extremely low, but
nonzero, mass. Still, the neutrino-oscilla-
tion theory remains controversial: the lat-
est calculated oscillation frequency appears
too large to explain the solar neutrino
deficit, leaving many physicists unsatisfied.
A Ray Davis. His simple and elegant ex-
T THE CENTER OF THIS STORY STANDS
periments have paid off in advances to hu-
man knowledge; they have led to new,
more complicated neutrino detectors and
inspired what seems like a new solar mod-
el every week; and they continue to pro-
vide answers to some of the most stubborn
questions in science. For example, with
the detection of neutrinos from the 1987
supernova, astrophysicists have come to
speculate that neutrino “telescopes” may
reveal the source of mysterious ultra-
high-energy cosmic rays.
Even today, almost ten years after the
experiment was to have been shut down,
Davis is keeping it going. “We have dis-
covered in the last decade that the neutri-
no count seems to correlate with the sun’s
sunspot cycle, something that had been
considered impossible by the theorists.”
The engine that churns out neutrinos lies
deep within the core of the sun. Physicists
had thought that, since such internal reac-
tions take millions of years to migrate to
the sun’s surface, the flares and sunspots
that erupt there would bear no relation to
the processes that fuel the sun’s engine.
The results of Davis’s experiments directly
contradict that view. “Since we don’t yet
know if this is merely a statistical anomaly
or an actual finding, it seems logical to
continue the experiment and see.”
A dramatic example of that kind of
anomaly took place in June 1991. Davis
happened to be at Homestake and had just
finished a routine extraction of argon-37
when the sun emitted one of the strongest
solar flares in recorded history. The radia-
tion swept across the entire solar system,
registering on sensors in the Pioneer 11,
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecrafts, drift-
ing beyond the orbit of Saturn. Davis did
a second extraction, and he was astonished
to remove approximately twenty atoms of
argon-37. That is equivalent to a neutrino
capture rate of 3.2 argon-37 atoms a
day—six times the usual rate.
T tonishing,
HE SIMPLICITY OF DAVIS’S WORK IS as-
especially compared with
the modern tendency to turn every scien-
tific experiment, from the Hubble tele-
scope to the CERN reactor, into a large-
scale corporate endeavor. For example,
the second generation of neutrino detec-
tors use gallium in their tanks and depend
on chemistry no more complicated than
that used at Homestake. As such, they
could conceivably be run with as small a
staff.
Yet the two gallium experiments,
GALLEX in Italy and SAGE in Russia,
seem more akin to government bureau-
cracies than to chemistry experiments. In
outlining their first results, the GALLEX
experimenters listed fifty-four coauthors
from ten research facilities. SAGE was only
slightly better, listing twenty-eight co-
authors from five institutions. The pres-
ence of so many strong-minded indi-
viduals can only make a project more
complicated and difficult to execute, in-
creasing the time and money necessary for
completing the work.
As the federal government continues to
tighten its budgetary belt in the coming
years, scientists in all fields as well as gov-
ernment officials would be well advised to
look closely at the story of Ray Davis and
his tank of dry-cleaning fluid. They might
find much more to learn than the strange
fact that neutrinos may have mass. •
ROBERT ZIMMERMAN is a writer, film -
maker and speleologist living in New York
City. His work appears frequently in THE
SCIENCES.
 the
Sciences
J A N U A R Y / FE B R U A R Y 1 9 9 6
NO ASSEMBLY REQUIRED
Protein folding has perplexed generations of biochemists. Now the problem may be about to yield.
BY GEORGE D. ROSE
HILE THERE IS LIFE, THERE IS HOPE—
W so said Terence, and so said Cicero.
But even more fundamental, wherev-
er there is life, there are proteins. Your
body contains roughly 100,000 kinds of them, half its dry
weight, and they take part in every single one of your bio-
logical processes. They metabolize your food, define your
form from skeleton to skin, transport oxygen and regulate
respiration, arm your immune system, package and repli-
cate your DNA, and serve as both signal and sensor for the
U N F O L D A P ROT E I N, A N D I T T H R A S H E S A RO U N D AT R A N D O M .
But wad it up just right, and it becomes the stuff of life.
network of chemical messages that interconnects your or-
gans. And that is just a beginning; the list goes on. And on.
What role a protein takes in that grand biological opera
depends on exactly one thing: its shape. For a protein
molecule, function follows form. Unreeled, it is just a long
string of amino acids. But wad it up just the right way, into
a bundle known as its native conformation, and it becomes
the stuff of life. The three-dimensional shape of a protein
is a complex, exquisitely fashioned molecular ideogram in-
volving interactions among thousands (often tens or even
hundreds of thousands) of atoms.
Not surprisingly, such an intricate structure is highly sus-
ceptible to alteration. A slight tweak—a touch of heat, a few
drops of bleach, a chance mutation—is all it takes to make
a protein lose its potency. That is why you cannot hatch a
boiled egg. It is also why people get Alzheimer’s disease,
Huntington’s disease, cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell anemia and,
probably, many forms of cancer. And yet a protein is also sur-
prisingly robust. Within seconds after it is extruded from the
cellular apparatus called a ribosome, it folds unerringly into
its proper form. No blueprint guides it, and barring extreme
measures, no edict can dissuade it. Just how a protein as-
sembles itself into its native conformation is a mystery. Bio-
chemists call it the protein-folding problem, and it is ar-
guably the simplest yet deepest unsolved problem in biology.
Protein folding, of course, is no problem at all for a
protein. It is more like a molecular reflex. Unfold the pro-
tein—say, by heating it carefully—and it will lose its con-
formational identity; the shapeless molecules just thrash
about at random. Return the temperature to a normal
physiological level, however, and the shape will return, too,
spontaneously, reliably and completely. That reversibility
was revealed in 1957 in a classic experiment by the protein
chemist Christian B. Anfinsen and his colleagues at the
National Institutes of Health. Anfinsen and his team were
studying the protein ribonuclease, an enzyme they ex-
tracted from cow pancreases. Through a series of delicate
reactions, they dissolved the chemical bonds that held the
molecule in its native conformation, until tests showed that
the ribonuclease was completely inactive. Then Anfinsen
rinsed off the solvent and watched the reaction that ensued.
Over the course of a day, the ribonuclease spontaneously
regained both its structure and its activity.
The implications were profound. Until then biochemists
had not thought of protein folding as a single chemical re-
action. For all they knew, it might be as shadowy and com-
plicated a process as is protein synthesis, which involves an
entire cellular manufacturing plant culminating in a web of
molecular assembly lines. Anfinsen showed that matters
were much more straightforward than that. There were no
cells in his beakers, only purified ribonuclease. No phan-
tom forces could be at work; the secret of protein folding
must reside within the chemical composition of the pro-
tein itself. Know what a protein is made of and, in princi-
ple, you know what it looks like.
Inspired by that prospect, investigators have spent the
second half of this century searching for the rules that gov-
ern protein folding—the universal molecular grammar that
will enable them to predict the structure of a protein from
first principles. It has been a paradoxical quest; the same
knowledge that makes the goal conceivable also drives
home how hard it is to achieve. But now biochemists are
starting to believe that the reach of theory will not forever
exceed the grasp of method. There is a gathering mood of
expectancy, a pervading sense that the problem is ready to
yield. As one step toward a solution, my colleagues and I
at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in
Baltimore, Maryland, have developed a computer program
that can reproduce and predict many aspects of the folding
of a wide range of proteins. It does so not by reproducing
precisely in silico the steps whereby proteins actually fold.
On the contrar y, the success of the program suggests that
one key to the practical prediction of protein structures
may lie in drastic simplification.
T
O UNDERSTAND WHY SIMPLICITY IS SO CRU-
cial to the problem of protein folding, one
must appreciate why the problem itself is so
complex. A protein is a polymer, a long, straight, un-
branched molecule made of smaller units strung together
like beads and connected by covalent chemical bonds. The
smaller units are amino acids—or, more accurately, amino-
acid residues, amino acids that have lost a few atoms (the
equivalent of a water molecule) from the ends of their
structures. The amino-acid residues that make up a protein
molecule can be read in sequential order, like the letters in
this sentence, and they specify the identity of the protein
completely: one sequence, one protein.
There are twenty kinds of amino acids in nature’s alpha-
bet for proteins, and they combine in sequences ranging in
length from about fifty residues to many thousands. Anfin-
sen’s protein, ribonuclease, is a petite 124 residues long. Even
a short chain of amino-acid residues, however, has the po-
tential for a vast number of variant spellings. The number of
possible proteins the size of ribonuclease is 20124—more
than a thousand million million million million million mil-
lion million million million million million million million
times the number of electrons in the universe. In contrast to
ten-digit telephone numbers, the “protein exchange” is in
no danger of running out of unique identifiers.
But proteins are not only multitudinous: they are also
multifarious. Each one is more supple than the most sinuous
snake. The flexibility stems from a chemical peculiarity of
amino-acid residues. Every amino acid is made up of two
parts: a common set of atoms known as the backbone, and
a chemical side chain that juts out of the backbone like a tag.
The side chain is different for each kind of amino acid. The
backbones, however, are nearly uniform. In all the amino
acids except ring-shaped proline, the backbones are made up
of three simple chemical structures: an amide group (nitro-
gen bonded to hydrogen); a carbonyl group (carbon double-
bonded to oxygen); and, connecting those two groups, a sin-
gle carbon atom known as the alpha-carbon.
Like lengths of pipe, those standardized backbones can
be stuck together—amide, alpha-carbon, carbonyl; amide,
alpha-carbon, carbonyl; and so on—to make a long com-
posite backbone, the molecular skeleton of a protein. The
alpha-carbons are what give the skeleton its flexibility.
The amide and carbonyl “vertebrae” connected to them
can pivot freely on their bonds, creating something like a
universal joint, a chemical hinge with two degrees of free-
dom. The 124-residue backbone of ribonuclease, for in-
stance, has 248 movable angles; the side chains, which also
can swivel on their bonds, add even more. The amazing
thing is that, from such a huge number of possible contor-
tions, one—and only one—native conformation emerges.
U
NTIL A FEW DECADES AGO THE MECHANISMS
behind all that conformational diversity were
unknown. Protein structure was a scientific
terra incognita. With scant evidence to go on, biologists
pictured proteins vaguely as featureless ellipsoids: spheres,
cigars, kaiser rolls. The conceptual log jam, like many
others in twentieth-century biochemistry, was broken by the
American theoretical chemist and biologist Linus Pauling. In
1951, on the basis of theoretical models, Pauling and his col-
leagues R. B. Corey and Henry R. Branson proposed that
protein structures ought to contain a tight coil of amino acids
called an alpha-helix.
Meanwhile, at the University of Cambridge, the chemist
Max F. Perutz was gearing up for an X-ray study of the pro-
tein hemoglobin. It was a daring enterprise (at the time, the
most complicated molecular structure solved by X-ray crys-
tallography was that of vitamin B12, almost two orders of
magnitude smaller than hemoglobin), but it paid off hand-
somely. Within months Perutz announced that he had de-
tected the alpha-helix. (Luck was with Perutz. Hemoglobin
is almost entirely helical. Among proteins whose structures
have been determined since then, the average helix content
is about 25 percent. Perutz could easily have picked one
with no helix at all.)
The first X-ray structures were heroic achievements re-
quiring laborious hand measurement of diffraction angles,
months of calculations and a good deal of trial and error.
Progress was slow. In 1957, the year Anfinsen performed his
groundbreaking experiment, the X-ray crystallographer
John C. Kendrew of the University of Cambridge applied
Perutz’s techniques to make the first atom-by-atom deter-
mination of a protein structure, a low-resolution X-ray ex-
amination of the protein myoglobin. The structure of ri-
bonuclease was not deciphered for another decade.
Today, however, sophisticated instruments, high-speed
computers and new techniques such as nuclear magnetic
resonance imaging have enormously simplified the atom-
by-atom determination of protein structures. Data bases
listing hundreds of protein structures and thousands of
variants are accessible via the Internet almost anywhere in
the world, and they have become indispensable tools for
biological and medical research. For structural biologists
like me, such archives are treasure troves. Delving into
them reveals a kaleidoscopic variety of recurring motifs,
which we recognize with the same sense of pleasing famil-
iarity that other connoisseurs find in the lines of a Mon-
drian painting or the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.
To describe the diversity of protein motifs, structural bi-
ologists have developed a rich and specialized vocabulary.
Structures may be primary (the linear sequence of amino
acids), secondary (folds) or tertiary (folded folds, which
specify the full three-dimensional conformation of the
protein). Four secondary structures—alpha-helices, beta-
sheets, reverse turns and omega-loops—make up more
than 90 percent of the conformational structure of all
proteins. And the hierarchy does not stop there. In many
cases, alpha-helices or beta-sheets serve as bricks in larger
superstructures. Superstructures can combine to make up
a domain, a structurally autonomous unit that resembles a
miniature protein within a protein. Since the 1980s—in an
endeavor worthy of the nineteenth-century French tax-
onomist Georges Cuvier—structural biologists such as Jane
S. Richardson of Duke University in Durham, North Car-
olina, have been hard at work naming and categorizing the
labyrinth of molecular structures.
S
OME INVESTIGATORS HOPE THAT MOLECULAR
taxonomy can help them predict protein folds.
Because folds fall into major classes, those
workers point out, perhaps they can function the way fin-
gerprint types do, to match the amino-acid sequence of an
unsolved protein against potential look-alikes in a data
base. By “threading” the trial sequence along the folds of
the known proteins, a computer could identify chemically
plausible candidate structures. The bigger the library, the
better the chance of finding a match. Such an empirical
method is only as good as the algorithm that compares new
sequences with the stored templates. And totally novel
folds, of course, will always slip through the net.
To avoid the limitations of empirical methods, other
investigators are seeking to predict protein structures from
first principles. The key to the approach is energy. Every
time you twist a protein chain, you set up a new pattern
of attractions and repulsions among its atoms. That pat-
tern determines how much energy is needed to untwist
the protein. In theory, every protein engaged in folding
should home in on one optimal energy—the lowest—just
as a ball at the top of a hill will head for its lowest poten-
tial energy by rolling toward the bottom. (A real ball, of
course, probably would not make it to the foot of the hill:
it would roll into a ditch on the way. No one knows
whether proteins can get similarly stuck in higher than
optimal energy states, or whether they all reach absolute
TO T H E T R A I N E D E Y E , P ROT E I N PAT T E R N S A R E A S P L E A S I N G A S
the lines of a Mondrian painting or the Ve rra z a n o - N a rrows Bri d g e.
rock bottom.) That optimal-energy principle is just an-
other way of putting the Anfinsen hypothesis, so it ought
to work. But for reasons that remain unclear, the ap-
proach has met with only limited success to date, despite
the best efforts of many outstanding physical chemists.
In my laboratory at Johns Hopkins my colleagues and I
have performed many computer experiments aimed at
coming to grips with the protein-folding problem. In our
work we draw both on the empirical approach and on first
principles. Our guiding principle is a characteristic of pro-
teins that the biophysicist Gordon M. Crippen of the Uni-
versity of Michigan in Ann Arbor and I discovered inde-
pendently in the late 1970s. The convolutions of protein
molecules, we noticed with some surprise, are organized as
an architectural hierarchy: domains can be divided into
subdomains, which can be divided into sub-subdomains,
and so forth. Consequently, not all chemical interactions in
a protein have equal priority; at different stages of folding,
some are much more important than others.
OR THE PAST DECADE MY COLLEAGUES AND I
F have tried to explain how the myriad forces
within a protein—some local, some long-
range—combine so that distant parts of a protein chain end
up as next-door neighbors. Typically, we started with too
many variables, too little insight and a few hunches, and
many promising ideas failed to pan out. But even the false
starts were instructive and helped lead to the work we are
engaged in today.
First we focused on hydrogen bonds, relatively weak sec-
ondary links that form between certain atoms already
bound in a molecular structure. Such bonds were Linus
Pauling’s favorite candidate for the driving force behind
protein folding. In 1992 the biochemist Douglas F. Stick-
le, now at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri,
and I took a molecular inventory of the hydrogen bonds in
forty-two proteins. More than two-thirds of hydrogen
bonds, we discovered, connect an amide hydrogen in the
backbone of one amino-acid residue with the carbonyl
oxygen in the backbone of another residue, which may be
many links down the chain of amino acids. When a pro-
tein folds, those distant residues come together in space in
a unique pattern. But all amino-acid backbones are the
same; with so many identical rivals to choose from, why
should the distant residues always pair up in exactly the
same way? Apparently hydrogen bonds between backbone
atoms could not explain such juxtapositions. Hydrogen
bonds involving side chains were just as disappointing. Al-
most all of them, our survey showed, are too short-range
to account for big folds. Some other force must be at work.
Next we turned to the hydrophobic effect, the tenden-
cy of certain amino-acid side chains to shrink from water.
The key to the “phobia” is carbon. Unlike the readily sol-
uble nitrogen and oxygen atoms, carbon atoms in proteins
tend to move to the interior of the protein structure, where
they shield one another from the surrounding water. That
observation was the starting point for another molecular
survey that I conducted, with Glenn J. Lesser, a hematol-
ogist-oncologist currently at the Bowman Gray School of
Medicine at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem,
North Carolina. Lesser and I wanted to find out whether
carbon atoms are more water shy in some amino acids than
in others. If so, we reasoned, the biases could give impor-
tant clues about the overall shape of the protein. Unfortu-
nately, carbon atoms turned out to be more or less inter-
changeable: on average, they bury 87 percent of their
available surface area, regardless of which amino acid they
reside in. Another dead end.
Searching for broader structures that might explain fold-
ing, with the structural and molecular biologist Leonard G.
Presta, currently a senior scientist at Genentech in San
Francisco, I decided to take a closer look at the alpha-helix.
The coils of a helix are held together by a regular, repeti -
tive pattern of hydrogen bonds that connect each amino-
acid residue to a residue four places ahead of it and to an-
other one four places behind it. Toward the ends of the
coil, however, that pattern breaks down. The frayed ends,
Presta and I conjectured, might contain signals that direct
the backbone into nonhelical conformations. I set out to
track them down, working with Rajeev Aurora, a molec-
ular biologist at Johns Hopkins University; Edwin T.
Harper, a biochemist at the Indiana University School of
Medicine in Indianapolis; and Jeffrey W. Seale, a bio-
chemist now at the University of Texas in San Antonio. We
discovered that, like the finished ends of a hemp rope,
many alpha-helices are whip-tied with chemical motifs
A P ROT E I N G E T S I T S S H A P E F RO M A N I N C O N C E I VA B L E TA N G L E O F F O R C E S .
The key is knowing which of them to ignore.
that supply extra hydrogen bonds. Such helix-capping mo-
tifs help explain why helices form in some segments of a
protein chain but not in others.
F
OR THE PAST TWO YEARS MY COLLEAGUE THE
organic chemist Rajgopal Srinivasan and I
have been developing a simple computer pro-
gram to fold a protein from first principles. The program
is called LINUS, at once an acronym for “local indepen-
dently nucleated units of structure” and a tribute to Linus
Pauling. Starting at one end of a protein, LINUS jiggles the
protein chain a few residues at a time, twisting them at ran-
dom into various poses. A subroutine calculates the ener-
gy of each pose; if one turns out to be clearly better than
others, LINUS “freezes” the residues involved, locking
them into position during future permutations. Then the
program continues down the chain and repeats the process
with another set of residues. After many thousands of rep-
etitions, LINUS arrives at a shape with optimal energy—
the conformation of the protein.
LINUS repeats its inspection tour of a protein many
times, each time calculating the energy over a slightly
wider range of residues. Because of the multiple passes, the
program favors structures resulting from short-range inter-
actions—LINUS’s way of simulating the hierarchical nature
of protein folding.
What makes it all possible is two drastic simplifications.
One has to do with the way LINUS decides which folds
to evaluate. In an ideal world, one with infinitely fast
computers, LINUS would look at every possible fold and
only then select the best one. In practice that is impossi-
ble; the numbers are just too large. Instead the program
employs a sampling technique called a Monte Carlo
method. At each point in its path down the protein, in-
stead of running through all possible twists and turns,
LINUS picks a few of them at random. If a pose looks
good to the energy function, LINUS keeps it—but the
program also keeps a few “bad” ones in reserve, just in
case the “good” poses lead to dead ends down the line.
In that way LINUS can reliably ferret out key conforma-
tions without having to test them all.
The other simplification is even more radical. It lies at
the heart of the energy function, the subroutine that de-
cides whether a trial conformation is a “keeper.” The de-
tailed energetics of proteins are enormously complex. To
do them justice, LINUS would have to tease out every
strand in an inconceivably tangled web of intermolecular
forces. The key to a practical energy function, then, is
knowing what to ignore. I worked on that problem with
Eaton E. Lattman, professor of biophysics and biophysical
chemistry at Johns Hopkins. We realized that we could save
ourselves a lot of trouble by splitting the problem of pro-
tein folding into two questions. One is why a protein
adopts its native structure instead of unfolding—the ques-
tion of stability. The other is why it folds the way it does—
the question of specificity.
The stability of a protein can be defined as the amount
of energy needed to unfold it, just as the stability of a chair
can be defined as the effort needed to tip it over. The speci-
ficity of a protein is more like the external architecture of
a house. The two questions are quite different. My cedar-
and-glass contemporary and your Brooklyn brownstone
may have similar stabilizing features (foundations, beams,
and so on); but adding another cross-member to further
stabilize my house will not make it look more like yours.
N WRITING LINUS, SRINIVASAN AND I REASONED
I that evolution has already taken care of the prob-
lem of stability: any proteins we encounter must
be stable, or they would not exist. Consequently, LINUS
ignores stability and focuses all its efforts on specificity. The
payoff for that selective ignorance is that the energy func-
tion can be heretically simple. It need not calculate the en-
ergy of a fold to two decimal places, or even to one. All it
needs is four basic rules:
1. Two atoms cannot be in the same place at the same time.
2. Each hydrogen bond counts as one energy point.
3. Amino-acid side chains are classified as hydrophobic (wa-
ter-avoiding and oil-seeking), hydrophilic (water-seeking) or
amphipathic (mixed). Each interaction between hydrophobic
side chains gets two points; between hydrophobic and amphi-
pathic side chains, one point; all others, zero.
4. In real proteins, amino-acid residues are not perfectly flex-
ible. Side chains and other obstacles get in the way, with the re-
sult that a residue finds certain angles off limits. In LINUS’s en-
ergy function, amino acids that stray into such “underpopulated
regions of conformation space” are penalized one energy point.
In short, almost everything LINUS does is based on rules
of thumb and extremely rough approximations. How well
does our simpleminded protein generator stack up against
the real folds of actual proteins? Very well indeed. LINUS
correctly, albeit imprecisely, predicts much of the sec-
ondary structure, supersecondary structure and large frag-
ments of tertiary structure—not bad for a young program.
It is an exciting time for Srinivasan and me, though we
never lose sight of the tendency of the protein-folding
problem to humble its most ardent devotees.

L INUS IS NOT THE SOLUTION TO THE protein-

folding problem. Indeed, it is not even clear
what a solution would look like; people
working on the problem disagree. Some investigators insist
on nothing less than the ability to predict, for any protein,
a conformation that rivals the accuracy of a high-resolu-
tion X-ray structure. Others might settle for a sketchy
bird’s-eye view of the protein backbone wending its way
through space. The molecular biophysicist Frederic M.
Richards of Yale University, codiscoverer of the structure
of ribonuclease, has a keen sense of the field and of the dis-
parate goals of the people in it. At a recent meeting on pro-
tein folding he predicted, with characteristic wit, that
progress in the next several years would convince 50 per-
cent of us that the problem had been solved.
If Richards is right, many biochemists and molecular
biophysicists now working will witness a solution during
their scientific careers. It would be hard to overestimate
the importance of such an event. A solution to the fold-
ing problem will drive activities ranging from the Human
Genome Project to rational drug design, protein engi-
neering and nanotechnology. In the long run, it could
even change the concept of self. Cognition and con-
sciousness are conditioned inescapably by the material
that houses them. Our proteins enable us to see but lim-
it what can be seen. Ultimately, the divine fire that illu-
minates our lives is mediated by the chemistry of our pro-
teins. They are us. •
GEORGE D. ROSE is a professor of biophysics and biophysical
chemistry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in
Baltimore, Maryland. He thanks Rachel Povereny for her contribu -
tions to this article. This article is dedicated to the memory of Chris -
tian B. Anfinsen, who died on May 14, 1995.
 O n C o m mo n G r ou n d

BROTHERS UNDER THE HAIR

The uneasy kinship between human and ape

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROSAMOND PURCELL

TEXT BY STEPHEN JAY GOULD

J ACOB DOUBTS THAT REBEKAH’S scheme will work. How can

her husband Isaac, now blind and dying, be tricked into blessing her beloved son Jacob rather than his
own favorite Esau? Jacob can imitate his brother’s voice, but Isaac may easily discover the ruse: “Esau
my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man. My father peradventure will feel me, and I shall seem to him
as a deceiver; and I shall bring a curse upon me, and not a blessing” (Genesis 27:11–12).
In the 1730s the Swiss savant Johann Jacob Scheuchzer conceived and executed the most elaborate popular (and
multimedia) work of science ever produced up to then—the equivalent of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos television series
and tie-in book of our own times. Scheuchzer’s Physica Sacra, in five volumes with 750 full-page engraved plates,
depicts and discusses every event in the Bible with any conceivable implication for natural history. Thus, Moses’
second plague inspires a lovely engraving of tadpoles metamorphosing into frogs, which then hop into Pharaoh’s
bedchamber, while Jesus’ designation of evil men as a “generation of vipers” (Matthew 12:34) calls forth several
plates on the taxonomy of snakes.
Similarly, when Jacob depicts his brother as a hairy man, Scheuchzer produces an engraving of Esau next to the
most famous early illustration of a chimpanzee [see top illustration on opposite page]: the mid-seventeenth-century
drawing of the Dutch anatomist Tulp, and a figure used over and over again in the history of science, most no-
tably by T. H. Huxley in the earliest Darwinian book on human evolution, Evidence As to Man’s Place in Nature
(1863).
In our desire to set ourselves apart from, and dominant over, nature—a dangerous position, imbued nonethe-
less with sufficient biblical sanction, most poetically in Psalm 8—we fear our striking similarity with apes and
monkeys. And yet, at the same time, we feel intense fascination with our closest relatives (as a visit to the primate
house in any zoo will affirm). This duality of repulsion and attraction leads us to make the obvious comparison—
and then flee from the evident implication of close and meaningful kinship. Scheuchzer himself provides a love-
ly example of this contradictory pull when he comments on his own engraving of Esau next to Tulp’s chimpanzee:
“Nonetheless, in making this comparison, I do not wish to insinuate that Esau was a Satyr [then a common des-
ignation for chimpanzees], nor that this race of savage animals has descended from him. I consider Esau as a mon-
strous man.”
Whatever our fear, whatever our wish to be apart, we are like the poor fellow in Samuel Johnson’s famous quip
about the man who tried so hard to be a philosopher but failed because cheerfulness always broke through. The
visually evident evolutionary closeness of ape and human shatters all barriers to an acknowledgement of affini-
ty—no matter how hard we try to prevent any breach in our mental wall of desired separation.
What could possibly be more different than the most elegant of all men in the most formal of all attires—Fred
Astaire in black tie—and a gibbon, the hairiest of apes? Astaire, who moved his arms and legs with maximal grace
and thrilled us all in film after film—and a gibbon, with hairy arms so long that, in virtually the same pose as As-
taire (who folds his hands in his lap), the ape must wrap them around its equally elongate legs. And yet we look
from one to the other, from man to ape, and we feel the visceral certainty of brotherhood.
Consider a final irony. Scheuchzer’s Esau and Tulp’s chimpanzee are as close as an ape and a man can be (for
chimpanzees are our nearest evolutionary relatives and Esau was an especially hairy man). Fred Astaire and a gib-
bon are as far apart as an ape and a man can get (for gibbons are furthest from us in genealogy among the great
apes and Fred Astaire is an exquisitely smooth man). Yet nature breaks through even here, and we know that kin-
ship lurks beneath the disparity of a coat of hair and formal wear. •
ROSAMOND PURCELL is an artist and photographer who lives in Boston. STEPHEN JAY GOULD is Agassiz professor of zoology
at Harvard University.
 Gold bowl, Ugarit, Syria, Fourteenth Century B.C.

SHARDS OF SPEECH
The words you are reading are shrapnel from a five-thousand-year-old cultural explosion.
Archaeologists and linguists now think they know where it erupted and who set it off.

BY DAVID W. ANTHONY

I
N JUNE 1994, AFTER CENTURIES OF TRADING
words with England, France closed its linguis-
tic borders. Long the lingua franca of diplo-
mats, French had been usurped by English in
this century and then, most gallingly, had been forced to
collaborate with its conqueror. As American movies, fast-
food chains and scientific journals inundated France, hun-
dreds of blunt Americanisms made their way into delicate
French mouths, signaling a “process of collective self-
destruction,” in the words of a statement signed by 300
French intellectuals. Then came la Résistance. According
to a law passed in 1994, terms such as le microchip, le fast-food
and le talk show are never again to appear in French publi-
cations. Car manufacturers are to replace les air bags with les
sacs gonflables. Businessmen, instead of discussing le cash flow
while flying in le jumbo jet, are urged to discuss la marge brute
d’autofinancement while in le gros porteur.
To many Americans, accustomed to the hybrid vigor of
their own language, the French law seems futile, if not
faintly comical. By maintaining that their language is un-
der attack from “franglais,” the government implies that an
older, purer French exists. Yet a brief review of linguistic
history should only deepen their concerns. Modern
French shares its source in Latin with more than ten other
languages. Latin, in turn, is only one of myriad languages
that sprang from a single, common linguistic stock: a lan-
guage spoken more than 5,000 years ago, known as Proto-
Indo-European (PIE).
In an age of multiculturalism and identity politics, Proto-
Indo-European offers a welcome reminder of common
origins. Ethnic roots, so often synonymous with ethnic
differences, tend to converge in linguistic history: the deep-
er you dig, the closer they grow. The mother tongue itself
has long remained beyond reach. But two centuries of
scholarship is finally providing firm answers to some of his-
tory’s most intriguing questions: Who were the speakers of
PIE? Where did they live? What was their language? And
how did its regional dialects become the dominant lan-
guages in so much of Europe and Asia?
Archaeological discoveries in Ukraine and Russia, to-
gether with new research methods in genetics and linguis-
tics, now point independently to a region that has been a
perennial candidate for the Indo-European homeland. If
those findings are correct, the speakers of PIE lived east of
the Dnieper River, in the grasslands of the Eurasian
steppes. By introducing horseback riding and wheeled ve-
hicles in the region, they revolutionized a pastoral econo-
my. That revolution, I believe, set off a linguistic explosion
that continues to expand with every century, echoing
through voices from Scotland to China, shaping English
and French (and Russian and Ukranian) and the words that
pass from one to the other.
 HE INDO-EUROPEAN PROBLEM WAS FIRST DE-
T fined by William Jones, a justice in the high
court of Calcutta. Jones’s appointment, in
1783, signaled Calcutta’s transition from a merchant colony
to a seat of the British government. It did little, however,
to dispel the city’s reputation in England as a place of myth-
ic exoticism. Fascinated with the complexities of Hindu
law, Jones became a student of Sanskrit, an archaic language
used throughout India in Hindu religious and legal texts.
For three years he pored over Sanskrit texts, the oldest of
which—the Rig-Veda—included hymns, accounts of rit-
uals and stories of the heroic traditions of a people who
called themselves Aryans. Then, in 1786, while presenting
a paper at a meeting of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Jones
uttered the sentence now quoted in every introduction to
historical comparative linguistics:
The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonder-
ful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than
the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing
to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and
in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced
by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine
them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some
common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.
An accomplished linguist, familiar with Latin, Greek,
Welsh and Gothic (an early Germanic language), Jones had
put his finger on a truth wrapped in an enigma.
In the centuries since Jones’s revelation, the search for his
“common source” has proceeded in two disciplines: com-
parative linguistics and archaeology. Bit by bit, linguists
have pieced together clues buried in ancient documents
and in modern languages, defining the nature of the rela-
tions between the Indo-European languages with increas-
ing precision. The Indo-European language family today
comprises most of the languages of Europe, including Al-
banian, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French,
Gaelic, German, Greek, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Nor-
wegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-
Croatian, Spanish, Swedish and Ukrainian (but not in-
cluding Basque, Finnish, Hungarian or Turkish). In
addition, Indo-European encompasses Armenian, Kash-
miri, Kurdish, Persian and numerous tongues of India, in-
cluding Bengali, Hindi and Urdu. Its extinct branches
reach as far as Asia Minor and Syria, home of the Hittites,
and into northwestern China, where Tocharian texts were
discovered in the ruined caravan cities of Xinjiang. Those
languages have been shown to share grammatical con-
structions and lexical roots that reveal their common an-
cestry.
Yet intriguing as it is, the linguistic evidence has long
floated uncertainly in time and space, waiting for archaeol-
ogists to moor it to specific graves, settlements and materi-
al remains. Unfortunately, many archaeologists consider the
Indo-European problem poisoned by propaganda. The
Nazi myth of a Germanic “Aryan” superrace was based
partly on the research of the German archaeologist Gustaf
Kossinna, who argued in the 1920s that the Indo-European
homeland was located in modern-day Germany. Today
equally fanciful assertions are made in Russia and other
Eurasian countries to justify racist beliefs and territorial de-
mands.
A
RCHAEOLOGISTS NOT PUT OFF BY the propa-
ganda surrounding the Indo-European prob-
lem have split into three camps: those who
distrust important parts of the evidence linguists have un-
covered, particularly their ability to reconstruct the proto-
language; those who root their theories in it; and those
who dismiss the entire Indo-European problem as unsolv-
able.
The first camp is represented by the archaeologist A.
Colin Renfrew of the University of Cambridge. In 1977
Renfrew proposed a scenario that remains popular among
archaeologists: The speakers of PIE were pioneer farmers
who lived in Anatolia (modern Turkey). Sometime before
6000 B.C. they moved northwest into Greece and the
Balkans, and from there east into Romania, Ukraine and
Russia, where they first established farms. Renfrew links
the Indo-European linguistic expansion with a well-doc-
umented demographic and economic expansion from
Anatolia into Greece and the Balkans. By placing the
Indo-European homeland in Turkey, he also helps explain
why certain words in Proto-Indo-European sound simi-
lar to words in both the Semitic languages of the Near
East (Arabic, Hebrew and the like) and the non-Indo-Eu-
ropean languages of the Caucasus (Chechen and Geor-
gian, for example). His scenario is clean and simple—
and therefore very appealing. It also suffers from a serious
weakness.
To agree with Renfrew, archaeologists must dismiss most
of what linguists have learned about the PIE lexicon in the
past 200 years. That archaeologists have been willing to do
so in great numbers demonstrates just how far apart ar-
chaeology and linguistics have drifted in recent years.
Comparative linguistics is unreliable, archaeologists have
charged. It relies too much on linear family trees, ignoring
the ways languages can borrow, converge or create cre-
olized versions of one another.
As an archaeologist of the second camp, I trust linguistic
findings but not the way they are sometimes used. Some ar-
chaeologists have assumed that because PIE was a single lan-
guage its speakers must have belonged to a single ethnic
group. They have then associated telltale artifacts with that
group—battle-axes, for instance—and have designated all
sites that contain them as Indo-European. Such assumptions,
though demonstrably false, cannot be blamed on the com-
parative method in linguistics, which is unconcerned with
ethnicity. On its own terms, the comparative method has a
proven record of success. It has predicted aspects of archaic
languages (the sound of w and k pronounced simultaneously
in Mycenaean Greek, for instance) well before their docu-
mentation in ancient inscriptions.
HEN COMparative linguists try to explain
W changes in a language, they first look for
unstable phonetic structures within the
language. Only if that conservative approach does not work
will they suggest that certain words, sounds or grammati-
cal forms might have been borrowed from other languages.
Although archaeologists, in their own work, are equally
skeptical of external agents of change, they often take sim-
ilarities between languages as evidence of borrowing. Nev-
ertheless, no amount of linguistic borrowing or conver-
gence has ever given rise to similarities as striking as the
ones between Indo-European languages.
Languages are shaped by culture and by biology. Cul-
tures invent and reinvent their own vocabularies, grammar
and syntax, whereas the mechanics of speech set limits on
cultural creativity. But words, once invented, tend to
evolve in predictable ways. For example, p’s often turn into
f ’s (the Greek pyr became the English fire), but f ’s less often
become p’s.
When two words with a similar sound and meaning do
appear in two or more languages, they may share a root,
in which case they are known as cognates. The English
word horn and the French word corne, for instance, each
evolved from the PIE root word *krn-. (An asterisk pre-
ceding a linguistic form indicates that the form is inferred
but unattested in any manuscript materials.) Or two such
similar words may simply be the same word, recently in-
troduced into both languages (café and coffee both are ver-
sions of the Turkish kahveh). Separating cognates from
borrowed words is a principal goal of the comparative
method in linguistics. To do it, one must know how a par-
ticular sound in one language should sound in a particu-
lar foreign cognate. Fortunately, the rules of sound change
are quite regular. If the word coffee had come from a PIE
root, its French cognate might be chef or cief—but certain-
ly not café. Given the rules of sound change in French and
English, no PIE word of any phonetic shape could have
evolved into both coffee and café.
Linguists have compared thousands of cognates, recon-
structing important pieces of PIE vocabulary and gram-
mar. The PIE root word *kmtom, for example, was recon-
structed from several cognates that mean “a hundred”:
šimtas in Lithuanian, centum in Latin and satem in Avestan,
an ancient Iranian language. Like pieces of a crossword
puzzle in three dimensions, with words radiating from their
every letter in every direction, PIE words have to satisfy
several arcane criteria at once. For the k in *kmtom to be
accurate, it must, according the rules of evolutionary sound
change, lead to the first letters of numerous cognates spo-
ken in far-flung countries. The longer the proto-word, the
more exacting the proof. Only random pieces of the pro-
to-language emerge via that method, but the authenticity
of the ones that do is thought to be highly reliable.
ECONSTRUCTED PIE IS A PRICELESS TREA-
R sure, providing a window into the religion,
kinship and descent systems, technology, so-
cial structure and economy of its speakers. To begin with,
the very fact that many PIE words and grammatical rules can
be unearthed suggests that PIE was a single language, perhaps
with regional dialects, rather than a group of languages. Par-
ticular word clusters, in turn, reveal rituals and beliefs be-
yond the reach of archaeological evidence alone. They show
that the speakers of PIE probably practiced patrilineal de-
scent and patrilocal (husband’s family) residence, recognized
the authority of chiefs who were associated with a residen-
tial-kin group, had formally instituted warrior bands, prac-
ticed ritual sacrifices of cattle and horses, drove wagons, rec-
ognized a male or father sky deity, and avoided speaking the
name of the bear for ritualistic reasons. They even demon-
strate two senses of the sacred: “that which is imbued with
holiness” and “that which is forbidden.”
Some of the more mundane words have enabled linguists
to circle in on the Indo-European homeland. For example,
the speakers of PIE probably did not live in Greece or
Turkey: The linguistic evidence makes it clear that they
were familiar with horses, and wild horses were either rare
or absent from that region, depending on how one reads
the archaeozoological evidence. The speakers of PIE had
words for otter, beaver, birch and aspen, and they shared eu-
phemisms for bear, so they must have lived in a temperate
environment. (On the basis of the cognates for names of
trees alone, the American linguist and anthropologist Paul
Friedrich suggested the PIE homeland was in what are now
Ukraine and western Russia.) Finally, the Uralic language
family (which gave rise to modern Finnish and Hungari-
an) borrowed words from early Indo-European languages,
and the Caucasian language families borrowed words from
PIE itself, so the speakers of those languages were probably
neighbors.
Viewed in an archaeological context, some PIE words al-
so hint at when their speakers lived. Terms for domesticated
sheep, pigs and cattle suggest that the speakers of PIE lived af-
ter 6000 B.C., when the earliest Neolithic economies were
established in the temperate zone. Terms for wheel, axle and
draft pole, and a verb meaning “to go or convey in a vehi-
cle” suggest that PIE existed as a single language after 3500
B.C., when wheeled vehicles were invented. Proto-Indo-
European must have begun to disintegrate before 2000
B.C.: by 1500 B.C. three of its daughter languages—Greek,
Hittite and Indic—had become quite dissimilar. Altogeth-
er, then, the linguistic evidence points to a homeland
somewhere between the Ural and the Caucasus mountains,
in what are now Russia and Ukraine, in the centuries be-
tween 3500 and 2000 B.C.
W
EST OF THE U RALS AND NORTHWEST OF
the Caucasus the Dnieper River runs
through the center of Ukraine and spills
into the Black Sea [see map on opposite page]. On the west-
ern bank of that river, near the modern village of Dereiv-
ka, people of the Sredni Stog culture built a Copper Age
hamlet and cemetery between 4200 and 3800 B.C. They
lived in buildings probably made of reed and timber;
cooked stews in rough, plain clay pots; buried their dead
in formal cemeteries near settlements; and decorated
their bodies with pendants of boar’s tusk and strings of
beads made from shells and animal teeth. The few copper
ornaments they had were imported from the west, prob-
ably by traders from the sophisticated Tripolye culture
across the river.
People at the Dereivka site herded cattle, sheep and pigs,
caught fish, and hunted deer and wild horses, relying on
the latter for most of their meat. In the case of one horse,
however, they made an exception: its hide, with its head
and the bones of one foreleg attached, was ritually buried
at the edge of the settlement along with the heads and pelts
of two dogs. The horse’s premolar teeth bear the unmis-
takable signs of bit wear (90 percent of modern horses that
are frequently bitted show bit wear). Since 1987 I have
studied bit wear in ancient and modern horses with Dor-
cas R. Brown, my wife and colleague at Hartwick College
in Oneonta, New York. We have noted the relative effects
of wear from metal, bone, rope and leather bits. The horse
at the Dereivka site, a stallion between seven and eight
years old, was bitted with a hard bit, probably bone, for at
least 300 hours. Because it lived around 4000 B.C.—about
500 years before the wheel was invented—the horse was
probably ridden. If so, it is the earliest direct evidence of
the practice of horseback riding anywhere in the world.
Nowhere would learning to ride a horse have been more
useful than in ancient Eurasia. At the center of that conti-
nent, the dry steppe extends 3,000 miles, from the mouth
of the Danube to Mongolia. Steppe dwellers began to
carve a secure, productive life from that desolate landscape
sometime before 5000 B.C., when they learned to domes-
ticate sheep and cattle. Horseback riding, practiced at
Dereivka 1,000 years later, dramatically improved the pas-
toral life. It enabled scouts to search for good pasture at
great distances, increased long-distance trade, expedited
large-scale herding and conferred an important military
advantage. When wagons arrived on the steppe between
3500 and 3300 B.C., the pastoral life completed its trans-
formation. Herders could now pack up their tents and sup-
plies, leaving their river-valley crops behind to follow their
herds through the steppe for a season.
HAT PACKAGE—HERDING, RIDINGAND WAGON
T driving—was first put together by the Yamna
culture. Descendants of the Sredni Stog peo-
ple at Dereivka and similar groups on the Don and Volga
rivers to the east, the Yamna people lived between 3500
and 2500 B.C. Their cemeteries, made up of between four
and twenty-five kurgans, or low burial mounds, are scat-
tered across the vast steppes north of the Caspian and Black
seas, between the middle Ural River (around Orenburg) in
the east and the lower Prut River in the west. In the west,
Yamna kurgans were built on the ruins of Tripolye
towns—once the largest human settlements in the world—
that were abandoned around the time the Yamna culture
appeared. The core of the Yamna area lay between the
Dnieper and the middle and lower parts of the Volga.
The Yamna people introduced a new way of life to the
steppe. They were the first to build some of their cemeteries
in the deep steppe, far from permanent water sources—
probably to mark off their distant pastures. They were the
first to extensively exploit steppe copper ores and to hunt
the saiga, an antelope of the deep steppe. Finally, they were the
first to possess wagons and carts on the steppe, valuing them
so highly that they sometimes buried them with their own-
ers—perhaps to carry the soul toward distant pastures in the
afterlife. Some 248 wagon or cart graves have been un-
earthed in the steppes between the Ural and Prut rivers, the
earliest dating to around 3000 B.C.
Neither an empire nor a unified polity, the Yamna cul-
ture was still powerfully influential. The societies that
adopted its way of life in the Dnieper–Volga steppes be-
tween 3500 and 3000 B.C. seem to have had common rit-
uals—as their graves demonstrate—and they probably had a
common language. That language, in all likelihood, was
Proto-Indo-European.
CCORDING TO A SCENARIO FIRST proposed
A by the American archaeologist Marija
Gimbutas and later revised by the archaeolo-
gist James P. Mallory of Queen’s University in Belfast, Ire-
land, and by me, the Yamna culture was the first to car ry
PIE into Europe. Cultures descended from it then carried
related tongues across the steppes to Iran and India.
Equipped with horses and wagons, the Yamna people and
their descendants used ideology, alliances and trade to
dominate their neighbors or exploit divisions among them,
transforming Eurasian pastoralism as they went. The Yam-
na region may have included the entire language family to
which PIE belonged. In that case, PIE was a local language
that gained high status and then gradually displaced its sis-
ter languages in the Dnieper–Ural steppes.
The Yamna people lived in the right place at the right
time to plant the clues later discovered in the PIE lexicon.
Unlike Renfrew’s Anatolia, their homeland had a temper-
ate climate, and it lay between the Ural and the Caucasus
mountains. It was home to otter, beaver, bear, birch and
aspen, and its location would explain the early ties between
Indo-European languages, Uralic languages and the lan-
guages of the Caucasus. Our scenario, by setting Indo-
European origins three millennia later than Renfrew does,
would also explain how words for wheeled vehicles en-
tered into PIE.
Renfrew argues that PIE never had terms for wheeled
vehicles because it dispersed long before they were invent-
ed. Later Indo-European languages borrowed those terms
from one another or from other languages, he maintains,
when wheeled vehicles reached their cultures. For that to
be true, Indo-European languages from India to Scotland
would have had to pass along the same set of terms for
wheeled vehicles that a single culture invented.
No archaeological evidence supports that idea, and
much contradicts it. Wheeled vehicles appeared almost si-
multaneously in eastern Europe, the steppes and the Near
East after 3500 B.C. No one knows where, when or by
whom they were invented, but their spread, understand-
ably, was quite rapid. The Indo-European words describ-
ing them fit seamlessly into their languages. The idea that
terms describing them were borrowed between languages
has never been supported by a linguistic study. On the oth-
er hand, numerous published studies have shown those
terms to be true cognates derived from PIE. The speakers
of PIE, the evidence shows, were clearly familiar with
wheeled vehicles.
INGUISTS GROUP INDO -EUROPEAN LANGUAGES
L into at least nine subfamilies—Albanian, Ana-
tolian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic (which
includes English), Greek-Armenian, Italic, Indo-Iranian,
Tocharian and perhaps Thracian—but they have long
disagreed on when each subfamily split from the mother
tongue. Recently, however, the linguists Ann D. Taylor and
Don Ringe, and the information science specialist Tandy J.
Warnow, all of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadel-
phia, have created a robust evolutionary tree for Indo-
European. Using a modified form of cladistics (a mathe-
matical method used to define relations between biological
species), they have shown that pre-Celtic and pre-Italic
separated from the Indo-European core quite early. Pre-
Tocharian, pre-Greek-Armenian and pre-Indo-Iranian
followed next. Pre-Germanic probably began to separate
from Balto-Slavic around the time the speakers of pre-
Greek-Armenian became isolated. After the speakers of
pre-Germanic became fully separated from Balto-Slavic,
they established contact with and began to borrow numer-
ous words from the speakers of pre-Italic and pre-Celtic.
Finally, pre-Baltic and pre-Slavic developed into two dis-
tinct languages.
The Yamna region gave rise to two migrations that help
explain the shape of that evolutionary tree. The first mi-
gration, inferred on the basis of well-dated archaeological
sites and vestigial genetic patterns in European popula-
tions, flowed from the western steppes into the lower
Danube Valley, the Balkans and eastern Hungary between
2900 and 2700 B.C. Pockets of Yamna migrants seem to
have coexisted, at least at first, with indigenous societies.
Seventeen Yamna cemeteries have been mapped in Bul-
garia, each including between five and twenty kurgans.
They continue up the Danube Valley and into the eastern
part of Hungary, where one specialist has counted 3,000
kurgans.
Kurgans in Bulgaria and eastern Hungary match those
in the steppe in every detail: the occupants are laid on their
backs with knees raised, their heads to the northeast; dag-
gers and silver temple rings serve as grave gifts; mats paint-
ed with red and white stripes or other geometric forms lie
on the grave floor or grave cover; red ocher or hematite
lumps are placed at the body’s hip or shoulder; and the
grave pits are covered in timber and topped with carved
stone stelae (broken and undecorated in Hungary, decorat-
ed in Bulgaria like the ones in the steppes). In Bulgaria one
kurgan contains a wagon. In eastern Hungary the immi-
grants had to import hematite for their graves. When
hematite was not available, they laid a lump of dirt next to
the occupant’s shoulder and painted it red. They went to
great lengths, in other words, to cling to Yamna traditions.
The Carpathian Basin went on to become a crossroads
for interregional trade, powerfully influencing the cultures
of central and western Europe during the Bronze Age. The
proto-Celtic languages, in particular, are widely thought to
have been associated with the Hallstatt culture, which
evolved in the mountains west of Hungary. The first Yam-
na migration took place at the right time and place to
spawn Italic as well.
HE SECOND MIGRATION OUT OF THE YAMNA
T region took place between 2200 and 2000
B.C., and it flowed east from the Volga–Ural
region into the steppes east of the Ural Mountains. The
Poltavka culture, which gave rise to it, g rew directly from
late Yamna at the northeastern boundary of the Yamna
world. (I am now investigating Yamna and Poltavka sites in
the lower Samara River Valley with support from the Na-
tional Geographic Society.) East of the Urals, the migrants
interacted with people of a different tradition, establishing
the remarkable Sintashta culture. The Sintashta people
built compact, fortified settlements, forged weapons and
ornaments in bronze and buried chariots in kurgans with
their dead warriors or chiefs. Aside from those burials,
traces of Yamna and Poltavka ancestry can be seen in Sin-
tashta weapons, pottery and head-and-hoof horse sacri-
fices.
Like the small figurine nesting within a wooden babush-
ka, Sintashta gave shape to ever expanding cultures. First it
joined with the related Petrovka complex to engender the
Andronovo cultural horizon, which spread across the east-
ern steppes to the Tien Shan and the borders of Iran and
Afghanistan. Andronovo helped shape the Indo-Iranian
culture which, in turn, led to a Persian culture that retained
some traces of Sintashta, including chariotry, horse sacri-
fices and the myth of the horse-headed human.
With Indo-Iranian, the path to PIE comes full circle.
Sanskrit is also a daughter tongue of Indo-Iranian, so sim-
ilar to Old Persian that it could have sprung only from the
same source. Like the Persians, the Aryans kept some Sin-
tashta customs alive—elaborate mortuary rituals and horse
and cattle sacrifices, for example. But they considered San-
skrit too sacred to set it down in writing. The hymns and
rituals of the Rig-Veda, with their gambling heroes, char-
iot races and paeans to plump cattle, were passed on orally
for centuries, even after Sanskrit passed out of daily use.
Transcribed, at last, and dispersed throughout India, they
made their way to Calcutta and the curious mind of
William Jones. Five thousand years after disappearing on
the steppe, the mother tongue had begun to be found. •
DAVID W. A NTHONY is an associate professor of anthropology at
Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, and director of the Insti -
tute for Ancient Equestrian Studies.
 Reviews
SORCERERS’ APPRENTICE
In the underworld of Aztec shamans, an anthropologist uncovers
a viper’s nest of feuds, poisons and gleeful murder
BY GARY PAUL NABHAN
A WAR OF WITCHES: A JOURNEY
INTO THE UNDERWORLD
OF THE CONTEMPORARY AZTECS
by Timothy J. Knab
Harper San Francisco, 1995
258 pages; $22.00
SNAKE POEMS: AN AZTEC INVOCATION
by Francisco X. Alarcón
Chronicle Books, 1992
162 pages; $10.95, paperbound
Y THEEND OF A WAR OF WITCHES T H EA N-
B thropologist Timothy Knab has overheard
assassination plots, ripped the heart from a
living chicken, flown through the Aztec
underworld as a whippoorwill, and fled from a killer witch
wearing a bristly bouffant. He can be forgiven, in other
words, for seeming less than dispassionate in his fieldwork:
“How did all this killing get started,” I asked Don Pedro, trying
to mask my eagerness. I sat down in a rickety old wooden chair
in front of his altar. Don Pedro pulled up a low bench. It seemed
he wanted to talk about those times.
“Well, I don’t know myself, but I can tell you what I heard
when I was a boy. Those ‘things’ were going about killing ev-
eryone,” he said, referring, as usual with Indians, to witches in
the impersonal form rather than as real people.
Knab’s own story begins less sensationally. In the early
1970s, equipped with a Ph.D. in linguistic anthropology
and a good working knowledge of Nahuatl—the language
of the Aztecs—he travels to Mexico to study Aztec story-
telling and healing traditions. Indigenous brujos, hechiceros
and curanderos (witches, sorcerers and faith healers) still per-
form Aztec rituals and recite Aztec incantations, serving
the lords of the underworld and occasionally asking them
for “justice” in return. The witches of San Martín, Knab
learns, have a long history of killing one another—a histo-
ry that began shortly after the Mexican Revolution and
culminated, in the late 1930s, with a crucifixion in the
town churchyard. Now some of the witches are at it again,
settling old blood feuds and kindling new ones. As Knab
learns their history and their craft, he becomes a target
himself and must decide which of his teachers to trust.
Perils and pitfalls always await a scholar who tries to in-
terpret another culture’s magico-religious practices. Value-
laden concepts are ne ver easy to translate accurately from
one language into another. (For instance, in Northern Pi-
man, a Uto-Aztecan language that I study, the term makai
may be translated as physician, shaman or giver; jeved makai
can mean Earth maker [a deity] or land surveyor.) When
those concepts include murder and fantastic feats of sor-
cery, the danger in mistranslation is more than academic.
Disbelief is usually the anthropologist’s best defense
against sorcery. A curse that relies on the power of sugges-
tion can paralyze local believers or throw them into a coma
while outsiders watch unaffected. Aztec witchcraft is not so
easily shrugged off. Witches may reinforce their curses by
sprinkling mold from a bat cave about the floor of a victim’s
hut, infecting the air with spores that can cause permanent
lung damage. They may mix ground obsidian with poison,
glue the mixture to the back of a small leaf and press that
“leaf of darkness” into a victim’s neck during a malevolent
embrace. Or they may create candles that give off “the night
wind” when they burn, paralyzing the victim’s lungs with
a powerful neurotoxin. “It must be burned in a small room,”
Knab overhears one witch counsel his client. “Then we’ll
cut [the victim’s] thieving candle short!”
Other magic tricks are not so easily explained—partic-
ularly when they are performed, almost reluctantly, by the
anthropologist-narrator himself. Have Knab’s years study-
ing with witches exposed him to their powers of sugges-
tion? He would probably say yes. His book is based on years
of fieldwork and solid scholarship, yet it is also shaped by
the demands of storytelling. As a result it provokes a cer-
tain skepticism even as it corrects some popular ideas about
gentle shamans and euphoric vision quests. Like the Aztec
underworld, A War of Witches is filled with truth and illu-
sion, with passages that bring an ancient tradition to light
and others that only obscure it. Once under the story’s
spell, readers may cease to care which is which.
M
ORE THANTHREE CENTURIESBEFORE KNAB
arrived in San Martín, Hernando Ruiz de
Alarcón began his own research into Aztec
witchcraft. A parish priest from the town of Atenango, in
the Mexican state of Guerrero, Alarcón was an agent of the
Spanish Inquisition. In disposition as well as circumstance,
he was also Knab’s shadow image. Alarcón had little to fear
from Aztec witches, but they had plenty to fear from him.
Rather than insinuate himself into their culture, he extract-
ed his information by force, locking his informants in cells
and often torturing them. For ten years Alarcón compiled,
translated and interpreted the chants, spells and invocations
of local conjurers and diviners, yet he was never in any dan-
ger of “crossing over” into Aztec culture—or, for that mat-
ter, of even beginning to understand it.
In his magnum opus, a Treatise on the Superstitions and
Heathen Customs That Today Live Among the Indians Native
to This New Spain, Alarcón acknowledges that forced labor
in Spanish mines and farms does “much damage to [the In-
dians’] bodily health.” If that labor were “borne out of love
for God [it] would be of much spiritual benefit,” he argues,
but the Indians insist on drinking themselves into oblivion
in their off-hours. That perplexes him. “Ministers and cu-
rates ought to try to convince them of the serious harm
that comes to their bodies and souls,” he writes. “This mis-
erable generation is entirely destroying . . . itself.”
In the 1980s the poet Francisco Alarcón discovered the
only extant copy of Alarcón’s treatise, in the National Mu-
seum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Struck by the beau-
ty of the Aztec incantations, and by the possibility that he
might be related to Ruiz de Alarcón, he began refining his
knowledge of historic Nahuatl and immersing himself in the
incantations. Although his connection to Ruiz de Alarcón
proved ungenealogical, his sense of kinship with the priest
grew. Among the poems and translations of Aztec spells
gathered in Snake Poems, one is entitled “Hernando Ruiz de
Alarcón.” It includes the following lines:
condemning I am
you saved yourself from your tree
by transcribing from your dream
maybe this cenzontle bird
without knowing in the wilderness:
the heavens your tomorrow
Raised in Jalisco (one of his grandmothers spoke a
Nahuatl dialect), Francisco Alarcón is keenly aware of his
people’s mixed heritage. In Snake Poems, which won the
Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award for
1993, he commemorates daily Aztec rituals. At the same
time he links the ancient Aztec world with that of Aztec
descendants now living in California. “My name/is not/
Francisco,” he writes in his original poem “Mestizo.”
my eyes but my dark my cheekbones
still see my mouth hands are fierce
Sevilla is Olmec Toltec Chichimec
Alarcón’s translations deftly capture the flavor of Aztec
incantations. Given the hours of torture and confinement
that went into procuring them, many are heartbreakingly
mundane. There is an incantation “To Earthworms Before
Fishing with a Hook” and one “Against Unruly Ants”
(“chase them away/close their town”); there is an incanta-
tion “Against Scorpion’s Sting and Poison” (“elder broth-
er/aren’t you ashamed/of hurting people?”) and one “For
Strained Chests” (“This affliction comes from working too
much with the arms,” Ruiz de Alarcón noted, “and is fre-
quently seen in those who dig in the mines”). If Aztec
witchcraft is truly the work of the devil, Ruiz de Alarcón
might have wondered, why are there spells “For Finding
Affection” and “Against Anger”?
RANCISCO ALARCóN INVESTS SNAKE POEMS
F with an added tinge of sadness: the Mesoamer-
ican forests that gave the Aztecs much of their
power have declined—and with them, he believes, the
power available to contemporary Mexicans. Knab, on the
other hand, emphasizes how much of the tradition remains
alive (and deadly). Like their ancestors, the villagers of San
Martín offer wax and incense to forces that “live every-
where,” as Ruiz de Alarcón put it. Knab’s teachers, for all
their virulence, remain as central to their communities as
does Domingo Hernández, an Aztec witch interrogated by
Ruiz de Alarcón. (“Before he had spent a day in prison, a
great number of Indians gathered,” the priest wrote. “They
brought me presents and begged very earnestly that I set
him free because he was the remedy and consolation for all
their illnesses.”)
By Knab’s account, the Aztec underworld seems to have
changed least of all. Modern curanderos journey there to
rescue lost souls from the lords of darkness or to steal the
souls of their enemies, just as the author of the following
lines did three centuries ago:
I will take her to
the center of the earth
I will deliver her to
the One-Called-Night
Knab stumbles onto such dark doings by accident. One
day, while interviewing a loquacious old healer named
Don Inocente, Knab is interrupted by an old woman seek-
ing Inocente’s advice. Knab steps outside but leaves his tape
recorder running inside. “It is my . . . my . . . daughter,”
the old woman begins. It seems that she was expected to
marry a boy who could help with the coffee harvest. In-
stead, the girl eloped with a mason in a distant city. “What,
my good woman, would you wish should befall this young
man?” Inocente asks, when the tale is done. She does not
hesitate: “Something a bit bad, a bit evil, O, Sir.”
Back at his hotel, Knab listens to the tape again and
again, resolving to warn the boy of his danger and to learn
more about Inocente’s witchcraft.
The anthropologist-as-detective, delving into an alien
culture, is a familiar figure in popular fiction. But though
Knab’s tale sometimes overripens with melodrama, it is
saved from cliché by its elegant writing and by the rich-
ness and reliability of its information. Knab has written or
edited four other books, and A War of Witches was writ-
ten with Peter Shotwell, a professional writer and editor.
Together they evoke an Aztec underworld of extraordi-
nary beauty and drama.
The reader learns, for example, that the underworld is a
“great flower of darkness,” with four kingdoms that radi-
ate from the center like petals. Each person contains a tonal,
a spark of life or soul, that can travel to the underworld in
dreams and visions. Witches such as Inocente and Doña
Rubia, Knab’s other teacher, learn to control their dream
travels. They know which local cave, well or sinkhole leads
to a given kingdom, and where in that kingdom a lost soul
may be found. “You entered . . . through the Eastern Earth
Mouth, and the winds took you directly to the cathedral
in one of the fourteen county seats of the underworld,”
Rubia tells Knab after hearing one of his dreams described.
S KNAB SINKS DEEPER INTO THECURANDERO
A world, his narrative subtly mixes sources,
from taped interviews to field notes and fi-
nally, in the most hallucinatory chapters, to dream journals.
By day his scholarly research continues. (From 1976 until
1984 he was a lecturer in anthropology at the National
University of Mexico; later appointments took him to
Wellesley College and Tufts University.) By night he visits
the underworld in dreams and visions:
We went with the doves, climbing onto them and flying through
the smoke and steam in the South. . . . We could see hundreds
of fires below us, all stoked by the popcamej, the “smoke ones,”
and their assistants. Finally, we came to a great bubbling pool in
the darkness and landed on a charred black tree. There were two
buzzards waiting for us.
“So you’ve come to see the Lord of the fires of the earth,” one
of them croaked. “He’s down there alright, but he’ll quickly turn
you into cinders if he sees you.”
True to his training, Knab begins by believing that Aztec
witchcraft is “little more than sympathetic magic.” As his
initiation proceeds, that definition falls apart. Sympathetic
magic can hardly explain Knab’s sudden gifts of divination.
During a particularly long dream, Knab comes upon a spir-
it called Cruz. A small man with glimmering eyes and a
mustache (rare among Indians), he fits the description of a
witch killed forty years earlier—one with good reason to
protect Knab from his so-called teachers. Cruz, though
unknown to Knab before his dream, becomes a key to un-
locking Inocente’s and Rubia’s darkest secrets.
A War of Witches is punctuated with lengthy interviews
with villagers, offering Rashomon-like multiple perspec-
tives on the same story. The origins of the war itself, how-
ever, are more reminiscent of a classic western. In the 1920s
a wealthy patrón named Don Antonio ordered his pistoleros
to gather the men of San Martín and bring them to his
plantation. Once there, the Sanmartinos were fed a lavish
feast, given bolts of cloth and other supplies from Antonio’s
store, and told to pay him back with coffee from their
fields. Most complied, converting their cornfields to cof-
fee and gradually deepening their debt to Antonio. Led by
Cruz, however, a few refused, using witchcraft to defend
themselves and sparking a civil war within the village.
Knab, in his acknowledgments, writes that his story is
intended to convey “some of the essence of the discovery,
adventure, and learning of twenty years of field work.” Par-
ticularly in the late chapters, it succeeds. The origins of the
war of witches itself offer a penetrating glimpse at class
struggle in Mexico, at the shifting economics of agricul-
ture and at the conflicting moral codes within the villagers’
hybrid culture. Knab, to his credit, never tries to resolve the
dissonance between his teachers’ Catholicism and their
witchcraft, between their furious acts of vengeance and
their willingness to stay on friendly terms with people who
murdered their loved ones—some of them small children.
4 2 THE S CIE NC E S • J anu ar y/F e bru ary 19 9 6
“I did nothing but serve the Lords of the earth,” Inocente
finally declares, leaving Knab with no choice but to gaze at
the chasm still separating him from his adopted culture.
I
N A GENREDOMINATEDBYDRY SCHOLARSHIP AND
New Age piffle, it is a relief to find authors who
are both authoritative and adept at evoking Mex-
ico’s rural countryside and its rich customs. New Age writ-
ing on shamanism tends to focus solely on the individual’s
quest for spiritual power and personal meaning. The social
and ecological contexts described in seminal works by
Richard Evans Schultes of Harvard University and other s
are all but ignored. In recent books by Lynn Andrews and
Terence McKenna, as well as in many of the articles in the
New Age quarterly magazine The Shaman’s Drum, literary
vision quests unfold on page after page of purple prose. Yet
their content is so ethnographically ambiguous that one
wonders whether the “anthropologists” writing them ev-
er left their living rooms.
The book that gave birth to the shamanism craze—
Teachings of Don Juan, by Carlos Castaneda—was gran-
diosely subtitled A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. The Yaqui
people themselves, however, would associate little of
Castaneda’s material with their own Yoemem traditions.
Even if Castaneda did spend some time in a Yaqui com-
munity, he clearly derived much of his imagery of
Mesoamerican traditions from far to the south of the
Yaqui homeland. Some scholars even allege that certain
passages were lifted, without citation, from historic
manuscripts from central Mexico. Neither Knab’s story
nor Alarcón’s poems will trigger similar controversy
among anthropologists.
Nevertheless, A War of Witches will be scrutinized by
scholars interested in how writing style can influence (or
bias) scholarship—a subject well explored by “reflexive”
linguistic anthropologists. The opening scene, in which
Knab introduces himself as a serious academic who just
happened to leave his tape recorder running, gives the rest
of the book a flavor of authenticity. That flavor is slightly
spoiled by Knab’s acknowledgements. A War of Witches was
originally meant to be a scholarly monograph, he writes,
but notes for that work (along with a photocopy of Ruiz
de Alarcón’s treatise) were seized by Chinese authorities.
At the Yak Hotel in Lhasa, Tibet, Peter Shotwell persuad-
ed Knab to record his story on audiotape—a feat of mem-
ory that entranced “an ever-increasing audience of
trekkers, travelers, tourists, and pilgrims” for two nights.
Shotwell’s recording later became the basis for the book.
Back in the United States, Knab still had his original
tapes, field notes and journals. But which recordings did
more to shape A War of Witches—the ones made in the
field, or the ones made in Tibet, nearly twenty years after
the fact? Knab admits that he must “take full responsibili-
ty for the devices [he has] used in forging a story out of
this material.” For example, the principal characters and
the village where they live have been given pseudonyms
to spare them from latter-day Castanedas seeking their
Don Juans.
To my ear—trained by two decades of ethnobiological
and linguistic research among Uto-Aztecan speakers—
the conversations in Knab’s narrative do not ring quite
true. The witches are always briefing Knab on techniques
in full sentences devoid of non sequiturs. Their overly di-
dactic tone, their rare allusions to previous understand-
ings shared with the author, lead me to think that Knab
has telescoped, shuffled and distilled their words from nu-
merous conversations, or else loosely reconstructed them
to tell a good story. I do not mean to imply that Knab’s
quotes are fabrications, only that there is an unresolved
tension between Knab’s narrative experiments and his
implied scholarly authority. The two gods are not equal-
ly served in all the passages.
Francisco Alarcón, in some remarkable ways, avoids the
perils posed by creative license and primary materials. To
begin with, the 104 poems in his book are identified as his
own, although they were inspired by and derived from an
earlier oral literature. Snake Poems is trilingual, with pas-
sages in Nahuatl, Spanish and English. In some places Alar-
cón’s original poems in English stand alone. In others he
puts original Aztec incantations or Ruiz de Alarcón’s
commentaries side by side with his own, loose translations
(citing their sources for the sake of future poets, translators
and scholars). Alarcón is a populist, “Mestizo-American”
poet, yet he peppers his book with more then fifty schol-
arly references. Knab, professional anthropologist though
he is, agreed to publish his book without footnotes or a
bibliography to keep from scaring off New Age readers.

N TIMES PAST, WITCHES, SHAMANS AND SORCER-

I ers were “hot” only when they were burning at

the stake. So why are they suddenly in vogue? I
am convinced, like many, that our multicultural society has
suffered from suppressing the darker elements of its tradi-
tions. The Day of the Dead in Mexico still has a cathartic
function in Mesoamerican communities; our scrubbed-
down version called Halloween does not. Like the sick
children treated by Inocente and Rubia, many Americans
seem to suffer from “soul loss”—only theirs is caused by
a lack of belief rather than by an excess of it. I dread to
imagine the questions that Knab and Alarcón were asked
as they toured the country’s bookstores and lecture halls
at the height of the shaman fad. (Knab’s dark take on
witchcraft was not appreciated, it seems, by the white
witches of Amherst, Massachusetts, or the neo-shamans
of Woodstock, New York.) Books such as these, anthro-
pologists often find, can reveal far more about their read-
ers than they do about their subjects. •
GA R Y PA U L NA B H A Nis director of science at the Arizona-Sonora
Desert Museum and cofounder of Native Seeds/SEARCH, a conser -
vation group assisting Native American farmers, gardeners and herbal -
ists. He is the author or editor of eight books, including DESERT LEG-
ENDS, which records his own mundane encounters with curanderos
in the borderlands. THE FORGOTTEN POLLINATORS, written with
Stephen Buchmann, will be released by Island Press in the spring.

Confessions of a Pyromantic
In praise of a volatile servant, an indispensable enemy
WORLD FIRE
by Stephen J. Pyne
Henry Holt and Company, 1995
379 pages; $30.00
P
EERING DOWN AT THE GREAT
Plains one night from a high-flying
jet, as moonlight reflected on cold
rivers, and hot embers of smolder-
ing stubble glowed in the harvested fields,
I could easily see why Aristotle taught that
ours is a world of air, water, earth and fire.
The wise stewardship of air, water and
earth has become a prime environmental
concern in modern times. But the man-
agement of fire has been relegated to the
purview of park rangers, foresters and civil
defense authorities. Fire, we of the
Smokey-the-Bear generation are taught, is
the scourge of campsites, condominiums
and carports. It is something to be prevent-
ed, first by our own caution and, if that
fails, by the effort and artifice of smoke
jumpers.
Viewed, however, from the cultural
and historical perspective of Stephen
Pyne, a professor of American studies at
Arizona State University West in
Phoenix, a veteran smoke chaser and a
confessed “pyromantic,” the obsessive
control of fire is both futile and destruc-
tive. Only recently, he points out, has fire
been cast as the bitter enemy of hu-
mankind. At other times and in other
places fire has been a helpmate, employed
to clear the ground for planting, grazing or
travel, to regulate pests, to flush and drive
game.
The migrations of Australian aborigines,
who traveled with fire sticks in hand, were
marked by lines of fire and plumes of
smoke [see “Fire Down Under,” by
Stephen J. Pyne, March/
April 1991]. Indian villagers used con-
trolled burning to clear the surrounding
forest of undergrowth, where tigers and
leopards could hide. Scandinavian farmers
once employed a form of slash-and-burn
cultivation called svedjebruk, which ceased
only in the 1920s. The practice not only
enabled them to turn bog and scrubland
into arable fields but also served to fertilize
the soil in a chilly climate where natural
Books in Brief
LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL
decay was slow. Fire was a faster form of
rot, helping establish a biological cycle that
benefited both land and farmer at the same
time.
Not that rural societies have always
made the best use of fire. In Greece an
economy that measured its wealth in herds
of domesticated goats created an ecology
of devastation. When fire swept Greek
mountain forests (which as recently as
1830 covered almost half the land area of
the country), denuded hillsides could not
sprout seedlings fast enough to satisfy the
hungry animals, much less to regenerate
the undergrowth needed to prevent ero-
sion. Only 10 percent of Greece remains
forested today. In Brazil and Indonesia, in
Siberia and South Africa, the burning of
forests and fields has brought both profit
and problems to local societies. Questions
about the proper relations between people
and fire cannot be answered with the sim-
ple dictum that fire must be avoided.
The only simple dictum is that fire can-
not be avoided. We live on a planet rich in
oxygen, a planet on which the everyday
cycle of life generates an unquenchable
supply of tinder. Remove people from the
scene, and fires would still take place reg-
ularly, sparked by lightning, driven by
wind, constrained by natural barriers.
Moreover, the human role in the natural
cycles of fire has persisted for millennia;
disrupting that role by extinguishing all
fires would itself be the folly of trying to
short-circuit nature. Stopping small fires
just allows more tinder to accumulate,
making the next fire even bigger. The his-
tory of the past century is rife with such
folly, though attempts to eliminate fire
have consistently met with failure.
Wisdom, according to Pyne, teaches
the harmonious coexistence of fire, land-
scape and civilization. The most serious
threat to achieving that balance is the ten-
dency of uncontrolled exurban home-
steading to overrun wildlands incapable of
supporting large resident populations. In
the canyons of southern California, the
deserts of Arizona, the grasslands of south-
eastern Australia and even the mountains
of Colorado and Montana, ranch homes
and two-car garages are intermixed with
wilderness settings that need the cleansing
touch of fire to survive. Such “intermix”
fires, which residents understandably insist
should be prevented or suppressed, pose
the greatest problems for achieving a sen-
sible fire policy. In those areas, as in much
of the rest of the world, as Pyne eloquent-
ly demonstrates, “it is the control of fire
that is out of control.”
FATAL DEFECT
by Ivars Peterson
Times Books, 1995
260 pages; $25.00
C ture, according to a joke making the
OMPUTERIZED AIRPLANES OF THE FU-
rounds of aeronautical engineers, will
have only two living creatures in the
cockpit: a pilot and a dog. The dog is there
to bite the pilot in case he or she tries to
touch any of the controls. And the pilot?
Glad you asked: the pilot is there to re-
assure the passengers that a human is in
control . . . and to supply someone to
blame in case anything goes wrong.
When computers dutifully perform the
unexpected, who should get the blame? It
may be fairly straightforward to finger the
culprits, especially if the problem is be-
nign: a modem that goes mute when your
spreadsheet is running or a spell-checker
that insists that “love love me do” and
“Please Please Me” contain unacceptable
repetitions. The fault may be the user’s,
for not installing the software properly; it
may be the programmer’s, for not catch-
ing a logical error; or it may be everyone’s
and no one’s: a conflict among software,
hardware and external environment that
could not easily be foreseen by either the
manufacturer or the user.
But as computers take on more and
more of the routine functions of industri-
al society, program reliability can become
a matter of life or death, and computer
bugs, however hard to find, cannot be al-
lowed past the factory shipping dock. Like
it or not, programmers must accept re-
sponsibility, ensuring that their software
will perform with as little risk as possible
to life or property. The code that operates
an antilock braking system must prevent a
skid even if a panicked driver forgets to
take his foot off the gas. The program run-
ning a nuclear-power plant needs to an-
ticipate hardware failure, operator stupid-
ity and natural disaster. Even the relatively
simple program running a pacemaker can-
not afford to skip a beat.
Absolute certainty is common in the
world of mathematics, but never in the
real world. Since computer programming
seems so similar to mathematical manip-
ulation, one might hope that certifiably
bug-free programs could be created, if
only a rigorous and effective testing algo-
rithm could be devised. Yet the more
Ivars Peterson examines the problem, the
more elusive it becomes. Peterson, who
covers matters of mathematics and physics
for Science News, finds that many software
developers regard mathematical proof as
only one way of guarding against buggy
software—and a flawed one at that. Com-
puter programs have become so convo-
luted and their interaction with machines
and humans so complex that it is difficult
to specify the entire range of acceptable
behavior, much less to anticipate all the
ways a program can go wrong. It is hard
even to know what “wrong” behavior
might be: one user’s bug can be another
user’s “hidden feature.”
Lacking a way of proving that a pro-
gram won’t go astray, software engineers
have had to rest content with strategies for
code development that foster simplicity
and intelligibility and that make programs
easier to repair and upgrade. Yet no one
can guarantee that programming disasters
aren’t out there waiting to happen. How
many financial programs will choke at a
second past midnight, January 1, 2000?
Will some future Intel processor add two
and two and get 1.987989828 when the
moon is full and the operator is moving
the mouse? If the past is any guide, soft-
ware will get better and better, but it may
never be as good as we’d like.
SIZES: THE ILLUSTRATED
ENCYCLOPEDIA
by John Lord
HarperPerennial, 1995
374 pages; $15.00, paperbound
THE SIZESAURUS
by Stephen Strauss
Kodansha International, 1995
242 pages; $25.00
V sidering a purchase: Each of these vol-
ITAL STATISTICS FOR CONSUMERS con-
umes measures 9 1/4 by 7 3/8 by 1 1/8
inches (23.5 by 18.7 by 2.9 centimeters for
the metrically literate). The pages of John
Lord’s book could carpet a thirteen-by-
thirteen-foot room, whereas Stephen
Strauss’s would cover only a ten-by-ten- that we have about thirty feet of intestines
foot space. If readers plan to use these packed into our bodies; Strauss points out
books as standards of mass, or if they want that an average person’s intestinal tract,
to hawk them wholesale from pickup unfolded down to the small protrusions
trucks, they will need 1,488 copies of (villi) that help absorb digested food,
Lord’s book or 1,631 copies of Strauss’s could cover half an acre.
book to make a metric ton, at a retail cost How to choose between such rich col-
of $22,320 and $40,775, respectively. lections of useful and useless data? My
Those with money to burn, along with advice to the compulsive sizer-up is to
stomachs for cellulose, could live for about buy both books; install them within about
four years on the caloric output of each twenty-four inches of your desk, easy
metric ton, assuming the energy content of chair, bathtub or commode; and enjoy
paper is the same as the energy content
of dry wood, as cited by Strauss.
them at leisure. •
Mere numbers themselves, of course, LA U R E N C EA. MA R S C H A L L, author of THE
are meaningless. But when attached to SUPERNOVA STORY, is a professor of physics
systems of measurement, they enable one at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania.
to comprehend the universe. Lord and
Strauss engagingly describe various ways
of making that connection, offering nu-
merous comparisons and examples that
succeed in giving a deep sense of what
numbers can mean.
In his series of essays—some serious,
some off-the-wall—Strauss discusses how
standards are defined and (occasionally
with great difficulty) accepted. The king’s
foot used to suffice as a unit of length; lat-
er a physical object was substituted; and
today length is defined by a procedure:
the counting of wavelengths of light from
certain kinds of atoms. Because standards
have become so technical, and because
the scale of measurement can range from
the infinitesimally small to the cosmically
huge, Strauss tries to come up with more
homely examples to give the average
reader a sense of size. He suggests that the
Big Mac, being familiar to most people in
most cultures, might serve as the most in-
telligible standard of mass and length. I
am about thirty-four Big Macs tall, for in-
stance, and tip the scales at about thirty
dozen Big Macs. Got the picture?
Each author devotes most of his text to
itemized definitions of units and handy
conversion tables. Strauss’s Sizesaurus is,
like its Rogetian namesake, organized by
kind of measurement. Under Pressure, for
instance, one finds a comparison of the
pressure exerted by an aunt’s stiletto heel
with the pressure exerted by the jaws of an
ant. To learn whether silk thread or steel
wire is more stretchy, look under Elasticity.
Lord’s book, organized in strict alpha-
betical order, is more unit- and artifact-
oriented. Here one finds the standards for
bra cups, envelopes, safety pins and weld-
ing glass, all tabulated, illustrated and clear-
ly explained. The reader learns that the
vara is a unit of length in Latin America,
that V.S.O.P. cognac must be aged at least
four years, and that rapids labeled Class VI
are best avoided by people in canoes.
Not surprisingly, there is some overlap:
each book describes the Richter scale and
the myriad systems for measuring light and
x-radiation. Even when they do overlap,
however, each one offers unique morsels
of data. I learned from Lord, for instance,
 Initial Conditions
EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK

O NE MORNING LAST O CTOBER I TOOK A CALL FROM A PRODUCER OF A

network television news and talk show. Would I care to comment
that evening about the Nobel Prizes in physics and in chemistry? Cer-
tainly, I said, I’d be happy to discuss the physics prize, for the discovery of the tau
particle and the detection of the neutrino. But I hadn’t learned yet who had won
the prize in chemistry. After a few minutes of questioning, the producer deter-
mined that I was fit to discuss physics, and he said two commentators, one for
each prize, would work well. I began to bone up on the history of taus, neutrinos
and Nobel Prizes.
At three o’clock that afternoon, the producer called again. Bad news, he said. The
news anchor had overruled him and wanted one person to discuss both prizes. Fair
enough. But, my curiosity piqued, I tuned in that evening to catch the broadcast.
What I saw was a polished performance—and a huge disappointment. The main
thing the news anchor could think to say about neutrinos was, “This doesn’t have a
practical application, does it?” The commentator had only platitudes: “We just want
to know how our universe is put together.” There was nothing wrong with the ex-
change, but, for the viewers, what an impoverished account! Had anyone bothered
to mention neutrino telescopes? Had anyone pointed out that neutrinos give as-
tronomers a window on the core of the sun? Had anyone noted that neutrinos had
been detected from the explosion of supernova 1987A? No, no and no. How much
more depth and excitement people would have found if the program had men-
tioned a tenth of what you’ll read in “The Shadow Boxer” (page 16), Robert Zim-
merman’s story of Ray Davis’s quest to detect neutrinos from the sun.
What bothers me most about the incident is the tendency it shows to make
science something apart from the ordinary world of human commerce. First is the
perceived need to “dumb down” science for the public. One often gets quite so-
phisticated political analysis and superb commentary on business and the economy
on television and in the newspapers. Sports reporting is tremendously complex,
full of statistical analysis and conceptual nuance. Yet when it comes to science,
adults are addressed as if they were still in the fourth grade.
The second thing that troubles me is the fashion in some parts of the media to
show their support for science by sanctifying it. Nothing could be further re-
moved from the tough-minded, questioning and critical spirit of scientific inquiry.
As this issue goes to press, we are all about to taste the fruits of one of the
grandest scientific expeditions ever launched, the Galileo probe to Jupiter. For a
few days headlines will capture the excitement of the findings, and ordinary peo-
ple will marvel at exotic images of the planet and its moons. But if the past is any
guide, the passion will soon fade, and the detractors of science will again be heard.
For make no mistake about it: science is under attack—by “cultural critics” and
deconstructionists, who deny its special claims to knowledge; by fundamentalists,
who try to smuggle creation “science” into the classroom (see Eugenie C. Scott’s
“Monkey Business,” page 20); by government budget cuts; and by sheer ignorance.
The physicist Robert L. Park recounts in a recent issue of his newsletter, What’s
New, how Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican from California, held a
hearing on the ozone problem stacked with scientists who deny the evidence of the
destruction of the ozone by chlorofluorocarbons. Three weeks later the Nobel Prize
in chemistry was awarded to three chemists who first called attention to the damag-
ing effect of chlorofluorocarbons on the ozone. It is difficult to imagine a stronger
rebuttal to Rohrabacher. But if the ozone problem, which is well established, can-
not get a fair hearing in the nation’s capital, it is hard to believe that the research
now being done to sort out the issues surrounding, say, endocrine disrupters will be
adequately funded (see the column by Diana Lutz, “No Conception,” page 12).
If you care about science, now is the time to write to your representatives in
Congress; to volunteer in science classrooms; to tell people about this magazine;
to make your voice heard about the importance of science to your way of life.
—PETER G. BROWN

SPRINGING THE
POPULATION TRAP
I do not expect fireworks in celebration,
but in just two years we will reach the
200th anniversary of Thomas Malthus’s
Essay on the Principle of Population. The
bitter contentions among scientists about
the vexed population problem have gone
on now for more than those 200 years.
Pessimists have seen sharp limits to how
many people can live on the earth, their
argument most often based on limited
food supplies. Optimists do not deny that
land—and therefore food—is limited, but
they think that God or evolution or hu-
man ingenuity or some other agency will
find a way of solving the problem. Joel E.
Cohen’s article “How Many People Can
the Earth Support?” [November/Decem-
ber] and the book of which it is a foretaste
not only present the issues with clarity
and fairness to both sides but come closer
to their resolution than any work I have
previously seen.
The solution is not made easier by the
game of musical chairs that has been
played. For most of the first 150 years af-
ter Malthus’s work, economists were the
pessimists, with land, labor and capital as
their three factors of production. Mal-
thus’s contemporary, the English econ-
omist David Ricardo, as well as Malthus
himself, took for granted that with land
fixed there would be declining returns to
labor as population grew.
In contrast, with the discovery and
acceptance of evolution, Darwin and his
interpreter Herbert Spencer were unqual-
ified optimists: evolution had brought
humanity to the pinnacle symbolized by
the upper-class Victorian gentleman, and
it was judged likely to continue to even
higher types.
That contentiousness is undiminished
in the second half of the twentieth centu-
ry, but the surprise is that the sides have
now interchanged positions. Economists
have come to see people as the decisive
agent of production and land as unimpor-
tant. They argue that the ingenuity of
people stimulated by free markets will find
a way of overcoming the finite area of the
globe and its finite resources. Biologists,
on the other side, see a deadly threat in the
current destruction of the ecological base
of soils and forests on which humanity,
along with all other creatures, must nec-
essarily sit. As economists dropped land
from most of their models, biologists took
it up as the ecological base of humankind,
as environment.
The article by Mr. Cohen and the book
that will amplify it show how biologists
Peer Review
LETTERS FROM READERS
and social scientists can resolve their dif-
ferences, and from there Mr. Cohen goes
on to show how we can escape from the
population trap. Mr. Cohen has written,
in the words of the biologist Edward O.
Wilson, “the definitive work on the glob-
al population problem.”
In so doing Mr. Cohen has done an
enormous service to science and scholar-
ship that could help all disciplines. For
when investigators contradict one anoth-
er in print and in other media, they cast
doubt on all branches of science. Congress
can dare to cut research budgets, with the
disastrous effects such cuts can have on the
national future, partly because on a central
issue the public sees scientists as engaged
in fruitless wrangling.
Mr. Cohen’s reasoned resolution of the
issues points the way to a reconciliation.
After 200 years his work can help us move
beyond a sterile debate.
NATHAN KEYFITZ
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
¶ Joel Cohen’s article is perhaps the most
inconclusive, question-filled article I have
ever read—as well it should be. Mr. Co-
hen is right to argue that no precise figure
for the earth’s human carrying capacity
can be calculated.
My only misgiving about this fine arti-
cle concerns the way Mr. Cohen per-
petuates the stark distinction between
pessimistic “ecologists” and optimistic
“technologists.” Such a division does a
disservice to the growing voice of techno-
environmentalism. Once that position is
added to the debate, a new set of poten-
tial answers—and questions—immediate-
ly emerges. Thus whereas Mr. Cohen
contends that paper is necessary for “ma-
terial well-being,” I would argue that
electronic media could virtually obviate
the need for paper (at least for communi-
cations) at no cost to our living standards.
A true techno-environmentalist consid-
eration of possible (or optimum) human
numbers would factor in the moral neces-
sity of allowing the planet’s other inhabi-
tants adequate habitat in which to live and
to maintain their evolutionary potential. If
Americans were to eat a largely vegetarian
diet, wear synthetic fibers, build their
houses and furniture from inert materials
rather than wood, live in high-density
cities connected with ultrafast rail lines, and
NOTE: Letters to the editor of The
Sciences can now be sent via electronic
mail. Our address is sciences@nyas.org
power the entire system with electricity
derived from photovoltaic cells, the coun-
try could probably support a larger popula-
tion than it does at present, at a reasonably
high standard of living, and still devote half
of its land area to reconstructed natural
communities. But as long as we insist on
rigidly segregating the environmentalists
from the technologists, neither will have
the necessary vision to begin the arduous
project of devising such a pathway.
MARTIN W. LEWIS
Duke University
Durham, North Carolina
Joel Cohen replies: In the past decade
Nathan Keyfitz, a demographer with a
uniquely penetrating perspective on his
discipline, has urged other demogra-
phers as well as economists and ecologists
to look over the walls of their disciplinary
trenches to the real problems of popula-
tion. Solving those problems will require
everything demography, economics and
ecology can offer, and more. My book
How Many People Can the Earth Support?
and the brief excerpt from it in The Sci -
ences attempt to respond to his call.
If my article gave the impression that I
intended to perpetuate a dichotomy be-
tween ecologists and technologists, as Mar-
tin Lewis suggests, I am sorry. I intended to
describe the extreme positions that can eas-
ily be observed today in public statements
by some ecologists and some technologists.
I agree with Mr. Lewis that a working part-
nership between ecologists and technolo-
gists could make important contributions. I
give specific instances of opportunities for
partnership in my book—in the use and
management of freshwater, for instance.
Several recent books (not cited in my own
book) elaborate on that essential collabora-
tion: Braden R. Allenby and Deanna J.
Richards, The Greening of Industrial Ecosys -
tems, National Academy Press, 1994; T. E.
Graedel and B. R. Allenby, Industrial Ecolo -
gy, Prentice-Hall, 1995; R. Socolow, C. An-
drews, F. Berkhout and V. Thomas, edi-
tors, Industrial Ecology and Global Change,
Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Mr. Lewis emphasizes technology and
the environment. Although it is surely
necessary to understand and guide the
interactions between the environment
and the economy (which includes more
than technology), that is not enough.
Population size, composition and spatial
distribution, as well as political and legal
institutions and cultural values, will also
play crucial roles in determining whether
people will live in high-density cities and
Continued on Page 5
will give up private automobiles for high-
speed rail lines, as Mr. Lewis envisages. I
keep in mind the interactions of popula-
tion, the environment, the economy and
culture by visualizing a symmetrical tetra-
hedron with vertices labeled Population,
Environment, Economy and Culture.
The symmetry of the tetrahedron implies
that population, ecology, the economy or
culture could be placed on top without
changing the message.
HAIRY QUESTIONS
As a scientist, it is easy to share the frus-
tration expressed by Robson Bonnichsen
and Alan L. Schneider in “Roots” [May/
June] at the possibility of not being able to
conduct DNA analyses on the human hair
recovered from the Mammoth Meadow
archaeological site. Undoubtedly such an
analysis would help address important
questions about human origins in the
New World. Certainly the Native Amer-
ican Graves Protection and Repatriation
Act (NAGPRA) was not intended to apply
to materials such as hair shed in normal
daily activity. The issues, however, are
vastly more complex. And to think that
the Indians are simply flexing their mus-
cles toward a profession that in their view
has been exploitative and insensitive is to
sell Indian concerns short.
Many of us archaeologists are dismayed
that Native Americans seem disinterested in
our work or reject it outright. What we fail
to understand is that the past exerts great
power, that there can be more than one
past, and that there can be more than one
valid way of knowing about those pasts.
One line from the article says it all: “It may
be that the tribes demanding the hair . . .
and the ancient people . . . share the inti-
macy of rediscovered ancestry, but until ar -
chaeologists examine the hair, no one will ever
know for sure” [emphasis added]. But that
very statement presupposes a resolution to
the crucial problem. We archaeologists
think ours is the only way of truly know-
ing; the Indians think theirs is. For Native
Americans to accept an archaeologically
constructed past, for them to let archaeolo-
gists speak about their past for them, would
be to admit that their own past is somehow
faulty—and to take another step toward
cultural extinction. No matter how much
archaeologists write about how their scien-
tific studies express respect for the past, their
protestations will mean nothing to tradi-
tionally oriented Indians.
The real power of NAGPRA is that it
demands we consult with the Indians. We
are thereby forced to deal with Indian
peoples as living peoples who are capable
of telling their own stories about their
own pasts. Real respect will come when
we learn how to put our tools into Native
American hands to address their own
questions about their own pasts—and
when we learn to understand the process-
es by which they come to know the past.
LARRY J. ZIMMERMAN
University of South Dakota
Vermillion, South Dakota
¶It is a shame Messrs. Bonnichsen and
Schneider are paying for the many de-
cades of grave robbing that have charac-
terized previous efforts to determine the
duration of the American Indian tenure
in the western hemisphere. Anything that
can be done to break the spell cast by the
nineteenth-century anthropologist Aleš
Hrdlička and the twentieth-century an-
thropologist Paul S. Martin would cer-
tainly be welcomed by many American
Indians. An even better idea would be to
ask some of the tribal elders where the
tribes came from. The American Indian
Science and Engineering Society did just
that in a conference on migrations, ori-
gins and creation this past November.
I deeply mistrust the scientific asser-
tions that regard dates for Indian sites
earlier than 11,000 years ago as being un-
reliable. Because the evidence regarding
passages across the Bering Strait is so
scanty—and each scenario currently ac-
cepted is so crazy (having a land bridge
while having a decline of the glaciers, for
instance)—why not throw away ortho-
doxy and start over? One cannot have
Clovis points invented in the southeastern
United States and also available to the first
migrants across that fictional land bridge at
the same time. The entire discussion of
origins is conducted by a small group of
scholars without any Indian input at all—
and that is ridiculous.
VINE DELORIA JR.
University of Colorado
Boulder, Colorado
¶The article by Messrs. Bonnichsen and
Schneider is most interesting for us Mex-
icans, given that all of us probably share
Indian ancestors and that no one has
charged a long tradition of archaeological
work with not having respect for our an-
cestors. On the contrary, the lack of at-
tention to, or funding for, newly discov-
ered pre-Hispanic sites is regarded as
proof that our Native American heritage
is being purposely consigned to oblivion.
Messrs. Bonnichsen and Schneider state
that “Native Americans left no written
records and little pottery,” which seems
awkward when you include among Native
Americans the higher cultures of Mexico
and Central America, namely, the Aztecs,
Maya, Mixtecs, Olmecs, Teotihuacans,
Toltecs, Totonacs and so forth. Of course,
if Messrs. Bonnichsen and Schneider fol-
low what seems to be a politically defined
concept of Native Americans (within the
boundaries of the U.S.), they are correct.
But it is sad that when they discuss patterns
of cultural significance, they appropriate
and restrict a term that defines all cultures
in the Americas, and in so doing they also
disregard the highest cultural expressions
of Native Americans.
Congratulations on your editorial and
artistic excellence!
JOAQUIN CARRAL CUEVAS
Mexico City, Mexico
Robson Bonnichsen and Alan Schnei-
der reply: We agree with Larry Zimmer-
man and Vine Deloria that there is much
that can be learned from Native American
views of the past and that more should be
done to promote Native American partic-
ipation in archaeology. That is a good
idea, one likely to provide new insights
into American origins and bring Native
American and scientific perspectives clos-
er together. We have difficulty, however,
with the proposition that Native Ameri-
can views of the past should supersede or
replace scientific methods in resolving
NAGPRA issues (if that is what Mr. Zim-
merman is implying). It has become pop-
ular in some circles to argue that Native
Americans and other indigenous peoples
should have exclusive control over how
information concerning prehistory is re-
covered, interpreted and disseminated.
Such a monopoly over intellectual inquiry
cannot be casually granted in a constitu-
tional democratic society such as ours.
More to the point, such a position is not
consistent with existing national policy as
expressed by NAGPRA. Mr. Zimmer-
man’s statement that “there can be more
than one past” raises fascinating issues
concerning the existence of objective re-
ality and whether that reality can be
known and verified. We wish we had the
space and time to explore the implications
of that topic, but we do not.
Mr. Deloria’s comments regarding the
debate over the first Americans are well
taken. Studies of the first Americans must
move beyond conventional models that
allow a time depth of not more than
11,000 years to account for the rich lin-
guistic, biological and cultural diversity of
the Americas. All too often, narrowly fo -
cused individuals with specific theoretical
biases have cast doubt on pre-11,000-
year-old dates and data by proposing ill-
supported “what if?” arguments. Unfor-
tunately, the “doubting game” has gone
too far. In some cases good research is be-
ing discredited for the wrong reasons. Re-
search on the first Americans will advance
only if rigorous objective standards and
multidisciplinary perspectives are applied
to all available lines of evidence.
Finally, it was not our intent, as
Joaquin Carral Cuevas charges it was, to
overlook the rich histories and prehisto-
ries of Mexico and Central America or to
imply any judgment about their cultural
or biological significance. It is likely that
some of the human remains and “cultur-
al items” found in the U.S. are from pop-
ulations that currently reside south (or
north) of the U.S. border. The focus of
NAGPRA, however, is on issues pertain-
ing to Native Americans, and the act
defines Native Americans as “a tribe,
people, or culture that is indigenous to
the United States.” Because of that focus,
there is a danger that the interests of na-
tive peoples who live outside the U.S.
could be disregarded when decisions are
made concerning the repatriation of their
ancestors’ remains. We have expressed
those concerns in letters written to the
NAGPRA Review Committee regarding
its proposals for federal regulations on the
disposition of “culturally unidentifiable
Native Americans’ remains.” Readers
who share those concerns can write to
the Archaeological Assistance Division,
National Park Service, Box 37127,
Washington, D.C. 20013-7127.
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
James W. Trent Jr. is to be commended
for his essay “Suffering Fools” [July/
August], in which he gives graphic illus-
trations of the social construction of
mental retardation. Mr. Trent is right that
merely relabeling a condition (from
“dyslexia” to “attention deficit disorder,”
for example) has little or no effect on so-
cietal perceptions. Benefits, if any, are
more likely to come about from changes
in common parlance that place person-
hood before condition (“people with
mental retardation” instead of “the men-
tally retarded”). Perhaps over time the
altered usage may have a subtle effect on
public perceptions.
DOROTHY C. WERTZ
Shriver Center for Mental Retardation
Waltham, Massachusetts
¶ In his essay James Trent makes the fol-
lowing assertion:
[Richard J.] Herrnstein and [Charles] Murray
seem to think that the eugenicists were right all
along. Intelligence is a fixed entity, they assert,
inextricably tied to heredity. Intelligent people
tend to marry intelligent people and to bear in-
telligent children. Welfare and education can
do little to prevent stupid people from likewise
replicating their lot.
I have read The Bell Curve (BC), and I can-
not find any text therein supporting Mr.
Trent’s first two sentences above. On the
contrary, on page 23 of BC I read: “Cog-
nitive ability is substantially heritable,
apparently no less than 40 percent or no
more than 80 percent.” I construe that to
mean intelligence is not inextricably tied
to heredity.
Moreover, on page 91, the authors of
BC state: “Cognitive ability is a function
of both genes and environment, with
implications for egalitarian social poli-
cies.” I do not find that statement to be
consistent with Mr. Trent’s first two
sentences above either.
Furthermore, on page 413 the authors
of BC state: “Because intelligence is less
than completely heritable, we can assume
that, some day, it will be possible to raise
the intelligence of children through envi-
ronmental interventions.” Again, the quo-
tation is at odds with the comments made
by Mr. Trent in the last sentence quoted.
My guess is that many people making
comments on The Bell Curve have not read
the entire book or are relying on review
articles written by authors who, likewise,
have not read the book. Otherwise, how
can one explain the contradictory quota-
tions cited above?
EDWARD F. D ECROSTA JR.
Hudson, New York
¶ James Trent effectively depicts the chang-
ing circumstances and opportunities avail-
able to people with mental retardation,
using as his conceptual framework the rich
sociological literature on social roles.
Mr. Trent’s largely historical portrayal
of Western society’s response to people
with mental retardation, however, can
easily lead the reader to underestimate
the short-term effects and the long-term
implications of social deconstructionism
both for the behavioral sciences and for
people with disabilities. The most con-
troversial question about whether to
classify a person mentally retarded in-
volves the most capable people who
might be so classified. In short, what is
the threshold for mental retardation?
Who gets classified and who gets special
services? The decision has powerful im-
plications for individual development,
because society sets aside many resources
for people with mental retardation, but
not generally for people who are “mere-
ly” slow or socially and vocationally
unsuccessful.
Ironically, because the 1992 definition
manual of the American Association on
Mental Retardation (AAMR) stresses that
labeling a person “disabled” creates neg-
ative social expectations about that per-
son (as opposed to realistic social expec-
tations), the manual makes mental
retardation a matter largely of social role
and social constraint. It advocates the
abolishment of components of the no-
menclature that were descriptive of the
heterogeneous abilities of people in that
group. In that way AAMR’s redefinition
and new model have ignored well-
established knowledge of the biomedical,
behavioral and epidemiological features
of mental retardation, as well as of the
psychometric properties of the clinical
measures (intelligence tests and adaptive-
behavior scales) that are used in making
the classification.
The few analyses of the implications of
the redefinition, using diagnostic clinical
data at the population level, indicate that
it leads to a massive increase in the num-
ber of children, particularly minority chil-
dren, who would be classified as mentally
retarded. We suggest that convenient ig-
noring of disagreeable or inconvenient
facts embodied in reliable, valid and gen-
eralizable knowledge is a hallmark of con-
temporary deconstructionism, and that
the AAMR redefinition is a case in point.
We also suggest that the types of de-
constructionist influences that have
begun to affect the field of mental retar-
dation are emerging in other clinical-
practice areas in psychology and psychia-
try. If mental disabilities in general are to
become understood as simply social roles
defined by how society reacts to people
who are identified with or accorded those
roles, there would seem to be little reason
for a social policy that sets aside special re-
sources for people with mental disabili-
ties, over and above what is afforded
other poor people. That, of course, is pre-
cious little.
JOHN W. JACOBSON
Independent Living in the Capital District
Schenectady, New York
JAMES A. MULICK
Ohio State University
Columbus, Ohio
James Trent replies: Dorothy Wertz
reminds a social constructionist like me
that relabeling and “changes in common
parlance” are not necessarily the same
thing. Changes in usages may, indeed,
alter perceptions and occasionally affect
social policies.
Like a fundamentalist preacher selec-
tively quoting scripture, Edward De-
Crosta wants to “proof text” The Bell
Continued on Page 47
Curve. I shall avoid the temptation to do
the same. Anyone who has read the writ-
ings of Herrnstein and Murray would rea-
the
sonably conclude that their loyalties are
closer to 80 percent than to 40 percent.
Furthermore, if Mr. DeCrosta believes
that Herrnstein and Murray’s isolated
mentioning of “implications for egalitari-
an social policies” makes them champions
of social egalitarianism, I fear knowing
whom he would label inegalitarian.
John Jacobson and James Mulick
respond thoughtfully and subtly to the
promises and problems of deconstructing
mental retardation. They show that essen-
tialists can appreciate the doubts of con-
structionists, as I hope my article showed
that a constructionist can respect the con-
cerns of science.
The value of deconstruction lies in its
power to tear down commonly held be-
liefs. Applied to mental retardation, decon-
struction challenges the claims made for
limitations, for intelligence and for mental
retardation itself. Thus, definitions of men-
tal retardation never again rest entirely on
the authority of science. The weakness of
deconstruction, however, emerges after an
edifice such as mental retardation is dis-
assembled. Given its emphasis on relativity,
deconstruction has trouble finding a new
source of authority for rebuilding. Put an-
other way, without the assurance of science
(or God or Marx or some other authority),
how might a postmodern conception of
mental retardation stand up?
My article called attention to that prob-
lem, but it did not provide a way out of the
question of authority. My hunch is that the
way out may come from unlikely sources.
Three possibilities come to mind—the lit-
erary critics Michael Bérubé and Janet
Lyons of the University of Illinois at
Urbana–Champaign, who have written on
mental retardation, and the philosopher
Richard Rorty of the University of Vir-
ginia, who has written about creating hu-
man solidarity out of contingency and
irony. If my hunch is right, such a post-
modern version of mental retardation will
find science necessary but not sufficient.
LIFE IN THE ICE
Jane Stevens’s beguiling account of a re-
search cruise into Antarctica’s late-winter
sea ice [Field Notes: “Martin’s Sense of
Ice,” July/August] should charm more
than just armchair travelers. Tour opera-
tors with converted Russian icebreakers
could be enticed to add deep-pack itin-
eraries to their offerings, advertising the
chance to walk on water—12,000 feet of
it, no less! Oceanographers will also be
surprised to read that they thought sea ice
was inconsequential—having long grant-
ed it a major role in ocean circulation,
bottom-water formation, air–sea interac-
tion and climatic change. And it is curious
that the considerable efforts made to study
it before 1986 have left the impression
that winter sea ice is “devoid of life,” “a
monolithic sheet, like the solid, quiet ice
that covers a Maine lake.”
Some earlier polar explorers left their
tales behind them. Long before seeking
fame in the North Pole follies, Frederick A.
Cook gained experience in the southern
hemisphere as ship’s physician on the Bel -
gica expedition. Beset for thirteen months
in the sea ice near seventy-one degrees
south in the southeastern Pacific, Cook
had plenty of time to gather material for
his 1900 book, Through the First Antarctic
Night. Excerpts show that open water
within the pack, now known to make up
more than 20 percent of the area of the sea
ice, functions as an atmospheric oasis for
air-breathing marine predators:
About the bergs we found some small holes
through the new ice, out of which there came
a puff of vapor with a hiss at regular intervals.
These were the breathing holes of the crab-
eating seals.
As winter deepened, along with the de-
spair of the Belgica’s crew, the crew per-
ceived a light in the distance, “like that of
a torch.” Upon investigation it turned out
to be “phosphorescent snow which had
been newly charged by sea algae.”
The journal goes on: “July 19. . . . On
our excursions we now see many seal and
penguin tracks.” In early August the im-
passable lead before them
extended as far as the eye could penetrate to the
east and to the west, a great polar river in a
mid-polar sea of ice. In it were hundreds of improved. Of course, pancake ice forms
whales, finbacks and bottlenoses, and countless in the Arctic in turbulent waters, and all
seals, Weddell sea-leopards, and crab-eaters, kinds of ice can be found in each place.
but strangely enough no penguins.
With each voyage into the Antarctic win-
Well, maybe not so strange, given leopard ter pack ice, however, scientists continue
seal dining habits. to make discoveries that accentuate the
The numerous leads that form in win- striking differences between the Arctic
ter as well as in summer not only provide
access to travel to and from the sea but also
and Antarctic sea-ice ecosystems. •
increase the heat flux between ocean and T HE S CIENCES welcomes correspondence
atmosphere. from readers. Letters should be typed and
STAN S. JACOBS include a daytime telephone number and com -
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory plete address. Brief letters are most likely to be
Palisades, New York published, and all letters are subject to editing.
¶In her lively and well-written article Jane
Stevens portrays the excitement, dangers
and importance of field research within
the Antarctic sea-ice pack. The measure-
ments and observations made from this
first-ever scientific expedition to the win-
tertime ice packs of the Amundsen and
Ross seas have already yielded surprises.
Ms. Stevens gives a solid sense of the
need for extensive comparisons between
satellite radar data and surface observa-
tions. Such comparisons are also needed
for the much more widely used satellite
passive-microwave data.
It is worth mentioning that the contrast
between Arctic and Antarctic ice, though
significant, is not as great as Ms. Stevens
suggests. For example, pancake ice does
not exist only in the Antarctic; hundreds
of other people and I have seen it in abun-
dance in the northern polar region as well.
In fact, most of the ice varieties Ms.
Stevens describes occur in abundance in
both polar regions.
CLAIRE L. PARKINSON
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, Maryland
Jane Stevens replies: Many thanks to
Stan Jacobs for his compliments on my ar-
ticle. He says that oceanographers have
long known the importance of sea ice, and
although that is true of Arctic sea ice, as I
am told, the role of Antarctic sea ice in
global circulation only recently came to
be understood and appreciated by the
general oceanographic community. Mr.
Jacobs, however, is a brilliant scientist
who is known for being far ahead of his
contemporaries, and I am sure he under-
stood the role of Antarctic sea ice long
before anyone else did. Moreover, not-
withstanding Frederick Cook’s astute
observations, before 1986 the general bi-
ological community of scientists regarded
the Antarctic winter pack ice as mostly de-
void of life. Since the first intentional sci-
entific expedition deep into the winter
pack ice in 1986, however, it has been
recognized that algae live in between the
ice crystals in the pack ice and form the
basis of a complex and thriving food web
that supports those wonderful seals.
My thanks also to Claire Parkinson for
pointing out the need to study sea ice in
the field so that satellite imagery can be
 W or ki n g H y po t he se s

Headless Nails
B Y RODNEY W. NICHOLS
President and CEO, the New York Academy of Sciences

EADLESSNAILS ARETHE BANEOF INCOMPETENT CARPENTERS LIKEME . EASY TO

H put in place, the nails are nearly impossible to remove. As a kid I was so
frustrated by them that ever since, whenever I feel the need to do any carpentry, I
lie down or read a book until the feeling goes away.
That image of the nails came to mind as I was returning from a meeting organized
by the New York Academy of Sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation’s conference
center in Bellágio, Italy. The meeting drew together a few experienced scientists,
engineers and physicians from universities, firms, and governmental and nonprofit
institutions around the world. In the light of growing economic competition, we are
rethinking how to foster more-effective international cooperation in research. An
architect confronting a dilapidated building of past distinction must decide whether
to renovate the structure or rebuild it. Our new challenge is to modernize the pub-
lic’s expectations of science while renewing national and global research institutions.
That challenge is as hard as removing a headless nail.
Consider the regulatory regimes that condition the pace of pursuing innovations.
Many countries have tradition-bound regulations that reflect not only past problems
(in some cases, grave disasters) but also resistance to new evidence, public anxiety
about safety and a top-down style of governance. In Europe, for instance, carefully
designed trials of agricultural biotechnology have been delayed by regulatory
authorities and protests. The delay, costing jobs and investment, is demoralizing
Europe’s world-class scientists and multinational firms. In the United States, envi-
ronmental policy making, especially with deregulation, must ensure that reliable
scientific information is briskly advanced, readily accessible and broadly applied. But
the U.S. institutional apparatus for environmental protection is often trapped by old
technologies, obsolescent treatments of risk calculation and a fragmented framework
for scientific advice. Even trust in solid scientific data is eroding.
Some nails are deeply embedded. Institutions pursue missions established long
ago—and, of course, some continuity is essential: universities, for instance, must
keep nurturing the disciplines. But even enduring academic missions have to change.
Cross-disciplinary fields become the robust frontiers; for example, biochemistry
barely existed a hundred years ago. Yet inertial forces compete with modern needs
and drag scarce resources down old roads.
Whenever institutions seem impossible to change, an expedient course is simply to
start new ones. In a sense, that took place in agricultural research when the privately
organized Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research began doing
what the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization might have done. It’s
taking place now in the Human Genome Project and in research on global climate
change. Nimble and ad hoc structures focus on the new opportunities that elderly
institutions cannot seize quickly or professionally enough to manage.
More generally, consider the prospects for global investment in science. History
shows that science and technology are the engines of economic development,
accounting for perhaps half the rising productivity that is essential for raising stan-
dards of living. Yet that record and the rhetoric about it are not matched by actions
to sustain it. Scientists and engineers do not vigorously confront the meretricious
arguments against science. The headless nail is the complacent assumption about
maintaining “progress” without long-term investments in research. Occasionally a
frankly antiscience mood or an understandable fear about change causes politicians
to temporize, to put the brakes on innovation. But it is one thing to pare budgets by
winnowing out the inessential and the mediocre. It is quite another to mortgage the
future by cracking the foundations of research and education.
The headless nails of obsolete regulations, obsolescent institutions and a compla-
cent investment strategy for research and development must be removed. •

A network of brain cells with a sense of direction
W
HEN CLOUDS COVERED THE
skies, ancient mariners resorted
to dead reckoning—estimating
position on the basis of compass
heading and distance run, with correc-
tions for wind and currents—to feel their
way across vast stretches of ocean. Some-
times it worked. Other times, when the
skies cleared and the sun or the stars re-
turned, sailors found themselves far off
course. Navigators today rely on global-
positioning satellites to find their way. But
in daily life a less formal version of dead
reckoning is well nigh indispensable, and
neuroscientists believe a network of neu-
rons deep within the brain enables people
to continue exploiting that ancient art of
navigation.
Patricia E. Sharp and Hugh T. Blair of
Yale University study individual brain cells
that make up the neural networks respon-
sible for navigation. Their subjects are rats.
But not just any rat will do: each of theirs
has a minute electrode, capable of record-
ing the electrical activity of single neurons,
implanted in a precise region of the thala-
mus or the hippocampus. During naviga-
tional experiments the rats reside in a round
enclosure about the size of a large pizza.
The wall of the enclosure is gray except for
a single white card, mounted to provide a
landmark. The rats roam free, looking for
food pellets dropped continually from an
overhead dispenser, while a video camera
records their every move. Rat-size headsets
transmit the electrical activity of a single
neuron next to the implanted electrode to
a bank of electronic equipment in an adja-
cent room; the minuscule electrical signal is
amplified, filtered, converted into an audi-
ble beep and passed along to a computer.
Two light-emitting diodes mounted on
the headset and monitored via the video
camera help the computer follow the ori-
entation of the rodent’s head as the animal
roams about the enclosure.
After attaching the headset to a rat and
placing the rat in the enclosure, Sharp and
Blair retreat to the adjacent room, where
they watch the wandering path of the rat
on a television monitor. An occasional
beep sounds, indicating the random firing
of the neuron next to the electrode. The
computer constantly records the path of the
rat and the electrical activity of the neuron.
Suddenly, as the rat swivels its head in a
new direction, the rate of beeping increas-
Quanta
RECENT SIGHTINGS
Head Reckoning
es dramatically, sounding like the insistent
buzz of a Geiger counter whose probe is
exposed to a rich radioactive source. The
buzz indicates the rapid, repeated firing of
the neuron. It continues to fire as long as
the head is turned in the new direction.
S known to neuroscientists. Residing in
UCH DIRECTIONAL NEURONS ARE WELL
the thalamus and in a region of the hip-
pocampal formation called the postsubic-
ular cortex, they are known to have vari-
ous directional specificities: one neuron
fires continually when the animal’s head is
pointing northeast; another fires when the
head is pointing west; and so forth. Be-
cause there are many such neurons, each
with a slightly different directional speci-
ficity, neuroscientists believe they work as
a mental compass to help an animal keep
up with its direction of travel.
But in contrast to a compass, direction-
al neurons do not rely on magnetic effects,
and they do not point reliably in a specific
direction. Occasionally they must be cali-
brated, and neuroscientists think calibra-
tion relies on visual cues. Thus when you
are lost, you look around until a familiar
landmark comes into view, which presum-
ably enables the directional neurons to be
recalibrated. In the rat experiment the vi-
sual cue is the white card on the enclosure
wall. If the wall is rotated ninety degrees,
the rats reprogram their directional neu-
rons by ninety degrees so that their direc-
tional specificity is consistent with the new
orientation of the cue. If the visual cue is
removed, the neurons maintain their di-
rectional specificity, but the accuracy
gradually declines.
Recently Sharp and Blair made a strik-
ing discovery while studying directional
neurons in another area of the thalamus,
called the anterodorsal nucleus. Those
neurons are quite different from the ones
in the postsubicular cortex. They do not
fire in response to the head’s pointing in a
specific direction. Instead, their firing rate
changes in proportion to both the angular
velocity and the direction, left or right, in
which the head moves. Sharp and Blair ar-
gue that the newly discovered neurons in-
tegrate the angular velocity and the direc-
tion of head movement to anticipate, by a
fraction of a second, the future orientation
of the head.
Neurons in the hippocampus and the
thalamus are interconnected, and Sharp
and Blair believe that by signaling to one
another they form a major part of a neural
network responsible for navigation. “Neu-
rons in the thalamus anticipate future di-
rection, but also communicate with the
hippocampus to learn what the current di-
rection is,” says Sharp. By putting together
the bits of information, the brain can keep
up with the absolute direction in which the
head is pointing as the animal wanders
around the experimental enclosure looking
for food. The neuroscientists think people
take advantage of a similar network of di-
rectional neurons to navigate across a fa-
miliar room, across town or across vast
stretches of land or water.
So the next time you have that dread-
ed sense of bewilderment that comes with
being lost, relax and look for a visual land-
mark that will enable your neurons to
reset their directional specificity. Soon
your navigational machinery will again be
functional, and you will be on your way
to your destination. Or just stop at the
next gas station and ask directions.
—ROBERT WALLACE
Brave New Worlds
Extrasolar planets
are no place like home
W asus, my first impulse was to throw a
HEN I HEARD THE NEWS ABOUT PEG-
party.
Not to dance a jig (I’m saving that for
the Higgs boson) or to run naked through
the streets shouting “Eureka!” (as I will do
when television signals arrive from Tau
Ceti). The news wasn’t that good, but it
did seem to merit moving New Year’s Eve
ahead a few weeks. A planet had been
spotted circling 51 Pegasi, a star forty-two
light-years away from the earth. The star
was the icing on the cake: spectral class G2
or G3, a kissing cousin of the sun. The as-
tronomers who discovered the planet,
Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the
Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, had
sat on their data until others could check
them, but by late November—just as the
Galileo space probe swooped toward its
historic rendezvous with Jupiter—they
were ready to publish. And I was ready to
start drawing up my guest list.
Hold your horses, said the experts.
“I think it’s definitely time to buy the
champagne. Whether it’s time to pop the
cork, I’m not so sure,” said Alan Boss, a
planetary scientist at the Carnegie Institu-
tion of Washington, D.C. The problem is
that the sighting of the planet (which goes
by the prosaic name 51 Peg B) was indi-
rect. All Mayor and Queloz really saw was
a series of regular shifts in the spectrum of
light from the parent star. Those shifts in-
dicated that the star was wobbling toward
and away from the earth, probably be-
cause of the gravitational pull of a plane-
tary companion. But the shifts could also
be caused by, say, a cool spot on the star,
which would make the light redden
whenever the spot rotated into view from
the earth. Astronomers are fairly sure that
a planet is out there, but they have not yet
ruled out other possibilities.
If 51 Peg B does exist, it probably
shouldn’t. It is big: one-half to two times as
massive as Jupiter, the largest planet in our
solar system. But whereas Jupiter orbits the
sun in a stately 11.86 earth years, 51 Peg B
circles its parent star in slightly more than a
hundred earth hours. To achieve such speed
it must be less than 4.5 million miles from
the star, an eighth of the distance between
the sun and Mercury. At first planetary sci-
entists were not sure that a Jupiter-like
planet could even survive, let alone form,
in such a hellishly hot environment.
In other words, hold the Veuve
Clicquot.
But after consulting their computer
models, theorists decided that a gas giant
probably could survive that close to 51 Peg-
asi, if it had formed much farther from the
star and gradually spiraled inward. As a sad
corollary, any earth-like inner planets
would have fallen into the star long ago.
The party was on again—though
maybe it should have been a wake.
Move Over, Peg B
THEN ANOTHER STELLAR PHENOMENON
knocked Pegasus right off the charts. On
November 29, teams of astronomers at
Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore,
Maryland, and the California Institute of
Technology in Pasadena jointly announced
they had discovered an object orbiting
Gliese 229, a star nineteen light-years from
the earth, in the constellation Lepus.
The companion body lies about four
billion miles from the star, roughly as far
as Pluto is from the sun, and probably has
an orbital period of about 300 years. It is
too cool to be another star: its spectrum
shows evidence of methane, a chemical
that cannot exist at stellar temperatures.
But at twenty times the mass of Jupiter,
the object is also too big to be a planet.
The astronomers announced that they had
discovered the first verified instance of a
brown dwarf.
A brown dwarf is a failed star. It is made
up of gases similar to the ones in a star, but
its mass is too small to kindle nuclear
burning. For many years cosmologists
hoped brown dwarfs might account for
much of the so-called missing mass re-
quired by current theories of the origin
and fate of the universe (see “The Shad-
ow Boxer,” by Robert Zimmerman, page
16). But although theory suggested brown
dwarfs should be common, decades of
searching turned up only a string of false
alarms. The body in Lepus, however in-
teresting in its own right, is unlikely to
revolutionize any models of the cosmos.
In a just world, my planned planetfest
would have taken place in 1992. That is
when Alexander Wolszczan of Pennsylva-
nia State University in State College and
Dale A. Frail of the National Radio As-
tronomy Observatory in Socorro, New
Mexico, announced that they had detect-
ed planets around a star 1,600 light-years
from the earth, in the constellation Virgo
(see Quanta: “Planetary Pulses,” by Karen
Fitzgerald, March/April 1992; and Quan-
ta: “No Place Like Home,” by Robert
Zimmerman, May/June 1994). A pulsar is
an incredibly small, dense, massive body
that spins in space like the rotating light on
top of a police car, spewing out powerful
radio signals from its magnetic poles.
Wolszczan and Frail showed that slight
variations in the pulses of the pulsar could
be caused by the gravitational tug of three
orbiting planets.
For many astronomers, however, the
pulsar planets were just too exotic.
“They really aren’t what we’re look-
ing for,” Boss says. “Those planetary-
mass objects are probably chemically dis-
similar to our solar system. They formed
during a much later stage of stellar evo-
lution, and they are probably bathed in
hostile radiation.”
What most people, astronomers in-
cluded, would love to see glimmering in
the depths of space is another solar system
akin to our own. But don’t hold your
breath. Current equipment is simply not
sensitive enough to detect small, rocky
planets close to a star, and most research
grants are too short-term to encourage
investigators to look for lumbering gas
giants. The state of the observer’s art is
virtually guaranteed to filter out all but
the misfits. That is fine with some as-
tronomers, to whom the mere existence
of such bodies is encouraging.
“However they form, nature is able to
make planetary-mass objects around a va-
riety of stars. That suggests that we need
to broaden our minds about what we’re
going to find, and where,” says Jonathan
Lunine, a planetary scientist at the Uni-
versity of Arizona in Tucson. Wolczszan
concurs: “It’s appealing to find something
that is not a carbon copy of the solar sys-
tem, but rather a little more uncivilized.”
—ROBERT J. COONTZ JR.
Phaser Beam
How to build a lazier laser
T Enemy ships are closing in. A con-
HE GIANT SCREEN TELLS THE STORY.
frontation is unavoidable. The command
goes out: “Fire phasers!”
Even the most casual Star Trek viewer
will recognize the oft-repeated command
and the futuristic beam weapon mentioned
in it. Phasers, however, are no longer con-
fined to science fiction. They exist, and
they may prove to be an extremely power-
ful tool for science and technology.
Phasers are a fundamentally new kind of
laser based on ideas proposed by the physi-
cists Olga Kocharovskaya and Yakov I.
Khanin of the Institute of Applied Physics
in Nizhniy Novgorod, Stephen E. Harris of
Stanford University, and Marlan O. Scully,
director of the Center for Theoretical
Physics at Texas A&M University in Col-
lege Station. The idea exploits a new twist
on existing concepts in quantum optics to
turn traditional laser technology on its head.
All lasers work by elevating some of the
atoms in a gas to a high-electronic-energy
state and then stimulating the high-energy
electrons to fall to a lower-energy state. As
the electrons fall they emit photons of radi-
ation whose energy is the difference be-
tween the higher- and lower-energy states.
Ordinary lasers won’t work unless more
atoms in the gas are “pumped” into the
high-energy state than remain in the
lower-energy state, a condition of the gas
known as population inversion. Otherwise
atoms in the lower-energy state would im-
mediately absorb the photons emitted by
the excited atoms, instead of letting them
take part in the laser beam. The stimulated
emission would rapidly be quenched.
Population inversion takes a lot of en-
ergy. Moreover, it is almost impossible to
maintain in lasers operating at high fre-
quencies, particularly in the ultraviolet
and X-ray regions of the spectrum: the
higher the frequency, the faster the atoms
decay out of the excited state. Thus high-
frequency lasers generally have to emit
pulses instead of continuous beams. And
for the moment, at least, only huge, pow-
erful systems can induce X-ray lasing.
Scully’s scheme cleverly manipulates
quantum-mechanical waves to prevent
photons from excited atoms from being ab-
sorbed by atoms in a lower-energy state. In
that way, his theory maintains, he could
create a lasing medium from which energy
could be extracted without population in-
version—that is, without placing a majori-
ty of atoms in the excited state. Recently,
Scully achieved his first experimental goal:
sustained lasing without population inver-
sion in sodium and rubidium gases. The
work offers hope that such advances as a
table-top source of ultraviolet or X-ray laser
radiation might be just over the horizon.
To understand how lasing without pop-
ulation inversion works, it is important to
realize that the electrons surrounding an
atomic nucleus occupy a range of possible
positions. Mathematically, those positions
can be understood as a “cloud” of proba-
bilities; the thicker the cloud, the higher
the probability that the electron could be
detected at that position. When a photon
impinges on such a cloud, the cloud ab-
sorbs its energy and changes shape.
Scully’s method trains two beams on the
cloud to play with its shape. One beam is a
weak laser with randomly varying phases,
which boosts part of the electron popula-
tion to a high-energy level. The second
beam deposits photons whose energy is
equal to the difference between two low
electronic-energy levels of the atoms in the
gas. That beam links, or superposes, the
two lower-energy levels.
The electrons in the two linked lower-
energy states act like oscillating waves that
are 180 degrees out of phase; their wave
crests coincide with their wave troughs,
and so they cancel each other out. The
lower-energy electrons thereby become
incapable of absorbing photons. Mean-
while the electrons that get promoted by
the first beam to the excited state are not
coupled to another state, and so they act
like waves that oscillate in phase. The re-
sultant medium can emit coherent, laser
light without absorbing its own emitted
photons. The substance, made primarily of
atoms whose electrons occupy a super-
position of two energy states, is a new form
of matter called a phase-coherent atomic
ensemble, or “phaseonium” for short.
“Scully’s work was the kind of thing
sitting in front of everybody’s nose and
nobody thought about it,” says Lorenzo M.
Narducci, a laser physicist at Drexel Uni-
versity in Philadelphia.
The properties of phaseonium have
benefits for a wide range of applications
besides lasers. Stephen Harris has already
exploited phaseonium to enable light to
pass through an ordinarily opaque mate-
rial. Phaseonium could also be employed
as a medium in highly sensitive magne-
tometers, high-resolution microscopes or
even laser-driven particle accelerators.
—YUVAL R OSENBERG
Flip-Top Bugs
Kafka was right: you are an insect
turned upside down
L one morning and lift your head. To your
Y I N GF L A TO NY O U RB A C K , YOUAWAK en
horror, your belly is vaulted, and the skin
of your abdomen is stretched across arch-
ing, riblike ridges. Franz Kafka’s story of
PH A S E R S A R E N O L O N G E R
confined to science fiction.
They exist, and they
m ay prove to be
an extremely powerful
tool for science.
Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis from ver-
tebrate to arthropod could be more than a
riveting work of fiction. It could be a new
way of thinking about the human body.
The first chapter in such a rewrite of our
vertebrate-centric world view would sure-
ly be the dorsal–ventral inversion hypoth-
esis, first proposed by the French naturalist
Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1822.
According to Saint-Hilaire, vertebrate em-
bryos and arthropod embryos share a body
plan, except for an inversion of the dor-
sal–ventral axis. Saint-Hilaire’s ideas were
quietly dismissed by his contemporaries,
and until recently they lay dormant. Then,
this past summer, the genes previously
demonstrated to promote dorsal and ven-
tral patterning in developing vertebrate and
arthropod embryos were shown to be
functional homologues. As it turns out,
Saint-Hilaire was right all along.
The findings, published last July in the
journal Nature, were the result of a col-
laboration between investigators at the
University of Chicago, the University of
Wisconsin Medical School and the Uni-
versity of California at Los Angeles. Led
by the Chicago developmental geneticist
Scott A. Holley, the investigators were
able to show that the development of an
organism’s architecture depends on cellu-
lar signals—that is, on growth factors that
determine which is back and which is
front. Thus vertebrate and arthropod em-
bryos do indeed share a body plan: the
vertebrate plan is simply the one for the
arthropods, except that the dorsal–ventral
axis is inverted.
How does development actually pro-
ceed? Protein molecules in the organisms
direct cells that will form the central ner-
vous system or the nerve cord to either the
dorsal or the ventral side. To find out what
those molecules are and how they func-
tion, Holley and his team monitored cel-
lular traffic by injecting RNA into devel-
oping fruit fly (Drosophila) and frog
(Xenopus) embryos. By staining the cells,
workers were able to observe cell-migra-
tion patterns in the initial stages of devel-
opment. The investigators were also able
to identify the genes that control the di-
rectional activity. In fruit flies the protein
product of the dpp gene promotes dorsal
patterning; in frogs the protein product of
the bmp-4 gene promotes ventral pattern-
ing. The expression of each gene is con-
trolled by the protein products of other
genes.
In flies the controlling gene is known as
sog; in frogs the controlling gene is chordin.
By injecting RNA into the embryos, the
investigators were able to establish a strik-
ing functional similarity between the sog
and chordin genes, as well as between the
dpp and bmp-4 genes. Amazingly, the pairs
of genes can replace one another and
function interchangeably. The fruit fly dpp
gene, when inserted into a frog, promotes
ventral patterning, though in flies it pro-
motes dorsal patterning. And the frog
bmp-4 gene, when inserted into a fruit fly,
promotes dorsal patterning, though it pro-
motes ventral patterning in the frog. The
same analogous interchangeability holds
for the sog and chordin genes.
As Holley notes, “Humans, fruit flies,
yeast—all share some genes, but not in all
cases can you take a fly gene and have it
do the same thing in a frog that it does in
a fly.” Indeed, the conservation of a ge-
netic function is a relatively rare event.
—CAMILLE COLLETT
Santé!
The good news about wine
keeps on flowing
C What could be less welcome for a tem-
ARRY NATION WOULD BE SHOCKED.
perance leader than the news that drinking
could be beneficial to your health?
For years physicians and medical inves-
tigators have noted that the French and
other people of the Mediterranean basin,
despite a diet rich in saturated fat (all those
creamy sauces!), have a relatively low inci-
dence of coronary artery disease. In 1992
Serge Renaud of INSERM (Institut Na-
tional de la Santé et de la Recherche
Médicale) in Bordeaux, France, reported
the phenomenon—quickly dubbed the
French paradox—on the basis of evidence
obtained from a population and epidemi-
ological study. He noted that light drinkers
were less likely than nondrinkers to die of
heart problems. Since then, numerous
studies have failed to explain the effect.
In fact, no one is even sure that alco-
hol alone is responsible for the benefits.
A team at the University of California at
Davis focused on the antioxidant prop-
erties of phenolic compounds—alcohol-
like chemicals whose structure includes a
benzene ring—in grape skins. Edwin N.
Frankel, a chemist in the university’s
food-science department and coauthor
of the study, examined the antioxidant
properties of catechin, the most abun-
dant phenol in red wine. He thinks part
of the credit should go to phenols.
A study at the Technion-Israel Institute
of Technology in Haifa supported the
Davis team’s conclusion by showing that
red wine, which contains more phenols
than white wine does, also confers more
health benefits. One investigator there,
Michael Aviram, suspects that by inhibit-
ing the oxidation of low-density lipo-
proteins (the “bad” cholesterol in the
blood), phenols may lessen platelet aggre-
gation, thereby thinning the blood and
slowing the buildup of cholesterol in the
arteries. The Technion-Israel team plans
to study phenol-rich foods such as toma-
toes and licorice.
Even more intriguing is the evidence
from population studies. Recently a
twelve-year population study of more
than 13,000 citizens of Copenhagen
between the ages of thirty and seventy
concluded that moderate wine intake
(which the study defined as between
three and five glasses a day) lowers mor-
tality rates. Curiously, beer that was
drunk in similar quantities had no effect.
Drinking hard liquor once a month pro-
vided benefits similar to those of drink-
ing wine, but the effect wore off as “dos-
es” increased to two or three drinks a
week. Three to five drinks a day in-
creased mortality rates.
Experts differ about how much alcohol
is beneficial. Since 1978
the English epidemiologist Richard Doll
has been studying the effects of smoking
and drinking on the health of 12,321 male
physicians in England. Doll found evi-
dence suggesting the optimal intake of al-
coholic beverages is the equivalent of
eight to fourteen glasses of beer or wine a
week. Drinking more than fourteen glass-
es a week increased the mortality of the
physicians in the study.
Samir Zakhari, who is chief of biomed-
ical research at the National Institute of
Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, suggests
yet different amounts. “For the sake of
definition, one drink a day for a woman
and two drinks a day for a man could be
considered moderate.” But, he notes,
what is moderate in Rome or Paris “may
not be considered moderate in Salt Lake
City.” Moreover, not everyone gets the
same benefits from drinking. “Usually
with people who are older and are smok-
ing, alcohol could be more effective and
give more protection. For young people,
say twenty-five or so, the relative risk of
being involved in a vehicular accident
may outweigh any benefit to the cardio-
vascular system.”
Zakhari warns that certain people—
including pregnant women, people with a
family history of alcoholism and people
taking medication—shouldn’t drink at all.
—LEVIN SANTOS