Q & A with Rob Dunn

Note: This will be the only post today because I feel strongly that you should read this.

Rob Dunn is an assistant professor of ecology at North Carolina State University and author of Every Living Thing -- a book released earlier this year that, as posted about earlier, I thoroughly enjoyed. The book is a history lesson of man's obsessive quest to catalog life -- a quest that was often falsely believed to have been accomplished, but, little by little, subsequent discoveries have reminded us how far we have left to go.

I sincerely thank Professor Dunn for his thoughtful responses.

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Q. What inspired you to write Every Living Thing?

A. I was really just fascinated with the question of how much remains to be discovered. I came to that question from a bunch of different angles, but it struck me how rarely we really consider it. There are hundreds of thousands of scientists, scientists like me, engaged in trying to understand some dark corner of the undiscovered world. But how often do we really stand up and consider how much is left to find? I found myself feeling like I was digging a tunnel through a mountain. I loved the digging, that every day process of shoveling dirt and yet I realized that I didn't know how far it was to the other side, how much longer we would be digging. And when, with that realization, I stopped digging for a second to ask others of my fellow shovel-toting scientists, I realized they didn't know either. I found myself fascinated by the question of how much tunneling was left to do and then also eventually by the scientists who had, in their own tunnels, somehow lunged ahead. Did scientists like Lynn Margulis, scientists who have already made breakthroughs, I wondered, have a clearer view of what was on the other side?


Q. How long did it take you to write and how many hours did you put into researching the stories?

A. That is a hard question. I suppose in a way I have been writing this book for ten years in that the stories I had the chance to tell were stories that had long fascinated me. Certainly thousands of hours, but I love the time in the library and on the phone tracking down how stories connect to one another and so it is time I hardly count.

That said, my wife had to sit through far too many breakfasts with the stories of the scientists in the book as additional breakfast guests. (Right now it is worse. My new book deals, in part, with the evolutionary history of humans and our wormy parasites. My wife just this morning gave me a look that rather officially said that she would really prefer to not hear any "cool new stories about tapeworms" while she is eating eggs.)


Q. I was struck by this quote: "the universe is not queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose." Can you please elaborate on this? What is preventing our ability to comprehend?

A. We are a big, naked primate. Our eyes evolved for looking at fruits, at each other and occasionally for snakes or predators. Our ears and noses evolved in similar contexts. Our sense of touch is lovely, but does not frame much of how we perceive the world. And so when it comes to studying the world, we look out with pretty impotent senses, senses that are good for what they evolved for, but clumsy at the new tasks we have given them, such as understanding the entirety of the living world. We have developed tools for seeing what our senses can't detect--microscopes, olfactometers, telescopes and the like. But these tools are imperfect. And so if you were to draw our world view, it would be primarily a view of things like us (with other humans most in focus, and then other things with big eyes, etc..) and then, at the margins, a fuzzy view of smaller things. We are limited by our senses and may always be.

But we are also limited by our psychology, for lack of a better term, in that even when we can see the smaller, or just more different things at the margin, they command less of our attention. We focus more on the discovery of a new monkey species, for example, than on an entirely new domain of life. And so to come back to the question, I think that when we say queerer, we mean less like us, more different than us, and so I empathize with the quote in that I think we are poor at seeing how unlike us most of the living world is and because we are so poor at seeing (or hearing or tasting or whatever) the rest of life, we are unlikely to even use the right tools to measure its strange ongoings.


Q. What is the common element that inspires these scientists to devote their lives to something that they very well many never find, or worse, may not be true -- and to do so in the face of intense criticism? Are they completely insane?

A. No, I don't think these scientists tend to be insane. They are interested, and perhaps in that interest lose track of the societal rules that suggest that interest, when focused intensely, is a little strange. Perhaps science is also a little more accepting of extreme personalities than are other fields. But I think the original inspiration is some combination of curiosity/interest and the realization that for most questions about the world no one has the answers, but you could go find them, if you are dedicated enough, and pay attention, and come back again and again to what you see to look at it from different angles. There was a really nice piece in, perhaps, the New Yorker (maybe not the New Yorker, I can't remember) looking at the different personality types that are present among artists. The article concluded that yes there are somewhat crazy artists whose best work comes out of the raw and wild insight of half-mad youth. But there are also artists who do their best work when they are older, work that has insights that come not of some raw experience of the world, but of experience distilled by and steeped in time. I'm not doing the piece justice, but I think there is something similar in science. There are many ways to be a brilliant scientist, some of which have an element of slightly mad obsession, but others of which are more ordinary, the monk in the garden tending his peas.


Q. Why are innovative scientists such as the ones in your book shunned by their colleagues? (Is it that the colleagues are embarrassed to work with what may seem like the equivalent of a bigfoot researcher, or do the colleagues feel threatened by the possibility that they are wrong? Scientists often say they enjoy being proven wrong, so what gives?)

A. Well, I'm not sure on this one. I think the big thing is that science and scientists are skeptical. Most big new ideas are wrong and so it pays to be initially skeptical.

I think it is probably appropriate that other scientists were initially skeptical of Margulis's work or Woese's work, for example. If scientists uncritically accepted big new ideas, science would lose some of its legitimacy as a kind of arbiter of truth. Big new ideas and their creators have a great burden and they should, in no small part because it is (or at least can be) very hard initially to tell a ridiculous new idea from a brilliant one.

Margulis and Woese, when they proposed their new ideas or discoveries, had seen things other scientists had not and those observations informed their views. To have believed either of them wholeheartedly early on would have been like driving headlong toward a speeding semi-truck. You might trust that it will swerve, but you better trust it a great deal.


Q. For a beginner who wants to explore the world of microbial life, how would you recommend getting started? Would you recommend a particular book, or a particular kind of microscope?

A. I would recommend a cheap microscope, but I don't have a particular brand in mind. Much of what is invisible to our eyes is visible with relatively minimal magnification.

Here is a decent link to info on amateur microscopy: http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/index.html. But the reality is one needn't have a microscope to see something new. Go into your backyard (bring a stool). Sit down in front of a log, roll the log over and start taking observations. The larvae of the ant one of my students work on has three suction cups on its back. No one knows what they do. The isopods under rocks, we scarcely know what they do. The mites that live on your forehead move about as you move about, but we know almost nothing about them. You could see them under low power.


Q. I am intrigued by the controversy over the definition of life -- what is your take on this whole mess?

A. It is messy. Personally, I prefer a related mess, which is how you tell where the boundaries of one organism end and those of another begin. Are we and our mitochondria separate or together? What about our bodies and the microbes in our guts? Many of the lines we would like to imagine are solid, when considering life, between life and non-life, for example, or between individuals, or even between species are fuzzy and complicated. Scientists and philosophers spend whole lives on these boundary regions battling over answers. Myself, I'm happy with a little ambiguity.


Q. If you could be science czar for a day, where would you put the money? That is, what, in your mind, are some of the most worthy scientific investments?

A. More money on the life near to us and less money on space, because even if we do find life in space, the fact remains that we barely understand the life here. So much remains to be understood here.


Q. Just for shits and giggles, please assign a probability to the following:

That we have discovered the smallest form of life on Earth.
zero. Not a chance.

That we will, at some point in our future, discover it.
0.002%

That life exists in the core of the Earth.

Very, very, close to zero, but I won't say zero.

That life exists on other planets.
More probable than life in the core of the Earth, less probable than discovering another kingdom of life on Earth.

That we will, at some point in our future, discover it.
A thousand times lower than the probability that it exists.

That life at least as intelligent as humans exists on other planets.
some exceedingly small number.

That another kingdom of life on Earth remains undiscovered.
10%

That life can exist without liquid water.
No guess.

Q. What are the biggest questions on your mind -- the ones that keep you up at night?

A. Well I guess I'm like all the other naked monkeys, I get stuck on the questions that relate to us. How much does it matter to us that we are ignorant about most of life? How will the changes to life forms we have barely even seen, much less understood, brought about by our actions affect us? What am I missing, what kinds of life, in my office or on my forehead? What are the mites that live in my pores doing? Do I need them? Do they mate while I am sleeping? Is it true that there is an unnamed species of mite that lives in the pores near our eyes? If I look sideways quick enough, might I see it? I wonder about the consequences of losing our parasites. We have evolved, since we were fish, with tapeworms, hookworms and the like in our guts. In the last few human generations, we have rid ourselves of those worms. What are the consequences?


Q. I anxiously await your next book -- when can we expect it and what might it be about? Any reading suggestions in the meantime?

A. I'm working on a book called "Clean Living is Bad for You." for Harper Collins (due this spring, out next fall) on the relationships between humans and other species and how changes in those relationships affect us. I'll deal with our parasites, our mutualists and then also the thousands of species on us that, at least superficially, seem neither good nor bad.

You might check out a few of my recent Seed Articles:

The Trouble with Biodiversity
Swine Flu Kills, Sometimes
I am a Rat and So Are You

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Related:

North Carolina Public Radio's The State of Things interviewed Rob Dunn twice:
Every Living Thing
The Co-Extinction Conundrum