Evolution Never Sleeps

"There's never been anything in the literature to indicate that chipmunks behave in groups."
"Well, maybe this is something new."
"What you saw was just normal duetting behavior. One animal barks, then the others join in. That's all."

If chipmunks began exhibiting cooperative behavior would we recognize it? Elisabeth Malartre's* short story Evolution Never Sleeps (pdf) asks that very question.

In the introduction to the story in the Year's Best SF 5 (1999), David Hartwell notes:

The hard science is evolutionary biology and the idea, while reminiscent of the riotously rubber-science B-movies of the 1950s, is rigorously executed and made serious. It teaches us something about the bedrock scientific theory of Evolution, upon which so much SF has been based since 1895.**

More recently, Malartre has written for the journal Nature's "Futures" short science fiction series (if you have a subscription to Nature, you can read "Words words words: Kissing a biotechnological blarney stone" and "Looking for Mr. Goodbug" online).

* Malartre is the pen name of a "biologist and writer living in Laguna Beach, California who teaches at the University of California, Irvine." She has collaborated on writing projects with her husband, UC Irvine physics professor/science fiction writer Gregory Benford.

** True, despite the claims of some naysayers.

Tags:science fiction, biology

Biotechnology and the Frontiers of Science (Fiction)

Back in 2003, the PBS show "Closer to Truth" hosted a roundtable on the question: "Is Science Fiction Science?" The companion website has a transcript, video clips, and brief interviews with the participants: Michael Crichton, Octavia Butler, and David Brin. Interestingly, all three authors commented on biotechnology and the biological sciences.

David Brin, who is a physicist as well as an author, pointed to the rapid pace of biotechnology:

Q: Will technology outpace civil control?

A (Brin): The fact is that it seems likely that the biologists will do and the biochemists will do to their big, huge building-size laboratories what the cyberneticists did to the computer. And not only make them smaller, but cheaper. It's happening at a curve that's even faster than Moore's Law. Within 10, 15 years you will see the MolecuMac in which any teenager in America will -- on his desktop -- be able to fabricate any known or unknown organic compound. There are all sorts of possibilities, but science fiction is supposed to look ahead a little ways and see what they are, and I see the MolecuMac. Under circumstances like those, civilization cannot hold together if we remain stupid.

Not unexpectedly, Michael Crichton commented on the dangers of biotechnology, suggesting it is even worse than the nuclear threat at the height of the cold war:

Q: What do you think the biggest threat to life is today?

A (Crichton): I think that the greatest hazard now comes from biotechnology. In the heyday of the nuclear standoff, it was never conceived of really as wiping out the species. I think it is absolutely conceivable that somebody could do something in biotechnology that would wipe us out.

Octavia Butler noted that the only "hard" science she has used in her novels is from the biological sciences.

Q: Do your own science research?

A (Butler): I don't write hard science fiction for the most part. My Xenogenesis trilogy* is, I guess, as close as I've gotten to hard science fiction and that's biological science fiction. So far, I haven't been writing about the scientist busily doing science. I'm more likely to be writing about the people who are affected by the science. I always wondered when I watched movies or television what was going on with the ordinary people because so often you would see the leaders and the scientists and the generals, and I was much more interested in how all this was affecting Joe Blow, Jane Doe.

The discussion itself focused on the use of science in science fiction from the three authors' different perspectives, not to mention politics, science teaching, and cultural biases. It's definitely worth reading the transcript (pdf) if you are interested in science fiction writing.
It's also worth reading the full interviews, and looking at some of the suggested links for "further edification".

The take home message is that developments in the biosciences will necessarily have a role in our future, and science fiction should take that into account. Yes, I'm biased . . .

* Microbiologist and author Joan Slonczewski has written that Butler's Xenogenesis ". . . creates a stunningly vision of abduction and seduction by an alien species. This vision is presented in terms remarkably consistent with modern molecular biology, even predicting developments that have occurred since the novels were written." (from "Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy: A Biologist’s Response")

Tags:science fiction, biology

Cutting-Edge Astrobiology

Astrobiology Magazine is an online publication from NASA. In addition to news relating to possible life on other worlds, and Frequently Asked Questions about astrobiology, there are a number of interesting feature articles.

Some highlights:
• Debating Life's Boundaries, Life as We Don't Know It, What is Life?, The Basic Rules of the Universe - panels from the Astrobiology Science Conference last March.

• "Great Debates" about terraforming , the possibility of life on other planets, and the threat of asteroids hitting earth. The "debaters" include both scientists and science fiction authors Kim Stanley Robinson and Greg Bear.

• An overview of Mars in Film

• Article about the possibility of alien infection ala Andromeda Strain.

• Film maker James Cameron on Mars and extreme life.

• "Table Talk" interviews with scientists and authors, including Bruce Runnegar, paleontologist and director of the Astrobiology Institute, Jack Farmer's testimony for the "Life in the Universe" hearings before the House Subcommiteee on Space and Aeronautics, and Philip Ball on "Water and Life"

• "Perspectives" in essay form from a wide range of authors, from neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks to Frank Drake (developer of the "Drake Equation")

• Special sections on the Extreme Life, possible Life on Mars, and more.


Here are the top 10 astrobiology stories of 2006:

January 2006: Stardust

As they clustered around the Stardust sample return capsule, Donald Brownlee, Stardust principal investigator from the University of Washington in Seattle, warned his team they might not be able to see any comet dust. The tiny particles may have made such small tracks in the aerogel collector that they would not be visible to the naked eye.
Wearing white bunny suits in a clean room at Johnson Space Center, the team anxiously examined the collector tray… and then broke into delighted celebration. Small black holes dotted the wispy aerogel tiles, and some were as large as half a centimeter wide.

January 2006: New Horizons Mission to Pluto Launched

After visiting Pluto, Charon, and the two newly discovered moons, an extended mission would allow the New Horizons spacecraft to encounter one or two Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). Because the Kuiper Belt is so vast, the closest KBO to Pluto is about 1 AU away, the same distance between the Earth and the sun.

March 2006: Water on Enceladus?

NASA's Cassini spacecraft may have found evidence of liquid water reservoirs that erupt in Yellowstone-like geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus. The rare occurrence of liquid water so near the surface raises many new questions about the mysterious moon.

March 2006: MRO Test Snaps

The first test images of Mars from NASA's newest spacecraft provide a tantalizing preview of what the orbiter will reveal when its main science mission begins next fall.

March 2006: Icy Super Earth Found

An international collaboration of astronomers has discovered a "super-Earth" orbiting in the cold outer regions of a distant solar system about 9,000 light-years away. The planet weighs 13 times as much as Earth, and at minus 330 degrees Fahrenheit, it's one of the coldest planets ever discovered outside our solar system.

June 2006: Venus Seeing Double

ESA's Venus Express data undoubtedly confirm for the first time the presence of a huge 'double-eye' atmospheric vortex at the planet's south pole. This striking result comes from analysis of the data gathered by the spacecraft during the first orbit around the planet.

October 2006: Looking Down on Opportunity

While Opportunity spent its first week at the crater, NASA's newest eye in the Martian sky photographed the rover and its surroundings from above. The level of detail in the photo from the high-resolution camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will help guide the rover's exploration of Victoria.

September 2006: Saturn's Methane Moon

Saturn's moon Titan seems to have little in common with Earth. At just 93 Kelvin, the giant moon is beyond ice cold, and its atmosphere is dominated by methane rather than nitrogen and oxygen. But in July, radar on NASA-ESA's Cassini-Huygens mission found a landscape with a striking resemblance to Earth.
[snip]
A methane molecule contains a single carbon atom. The methane that formed these depressions was probably converted by solar-powered processes into the two-carbon hydrocarbon ethane, and eventually into other hydrocarbons and "a whole suite of nitrogen-bearing molecules," Lunine says. Under the right conditions, these simple molecules could become the building blocks of life.

November 2006: MGS Over and Out?

NASA's Mars Global Surveyor has likely finished its operating career. The spacecraft has served the longest and been the most productive of any mission ever sent to the red planet.

December 2006: Water Flows Today on Mars

NASA photographs have revealed bright new deposits seen in two gullies on Mars that suggest water carried sediment through them sometime during the past seven years.

Finally, if you can't find the information you are interested in, you can always Ask an Astrobiologist.