The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2007 (The Best American Series (TM))

Our guest editor this year, Richard Preston, thinks the best essays are written by authors who have a personal obsession with the subject matter. It shows in this collection - there is not a single article that does not resonate from an author's passion. There are 28 essays from 20 different periodicals. "Smithsonian" is best represented with four articles. The articles are generally light on hard science, heavy on nature and ecology, and heavy on memoirs. I go out of my way to get this excellent yearly and am never disappointed in it, or in its competitor of a similar name, "Best of American Science Writing." I have asterisked my personal favorites among these brief summaries:

Paul Bennett - Rome is a paradise for archeology, where an archeologist is present anytime a construction project involves excavation. Backhoe operators must stop immediately if something of interest is unearthed, making for constant work slowdowns. Recently a two foot marble head of Constantine was found blocking a sewer drain under the Roman Forum.

Susan Casey - In the northern Pacific, air and water currents create doldrum areas twice the size of Texas where plastic accumulates. This area contains six times as much plastic as it does plankton and there are four more ocean sites like it around the world. Every bit of plastic ever made still exists, and each year we churn out another 60 billion tons of it.

Richard Conniff - A memoir about Patricia Wright, the Jane Goodall of lemurs. An extinct lemur the size of a gorilla roamed Madagascar 350 years ago and the island still has 50 species left. Wright is responsible for preventing much deforestation in Madagascar and the creation of thousands of acres of national parks.

Alison Hawthorne Deming - Mars is a planet "so bloody with iron, it was named after the Roman god of war." Spirit and Opportunity are still exploring it. Many astronomers and evolutionary biologists now believe it's a matter of "when," not "if," conditions favorable to life are found outside of earth.

Brian Doyle - The author relates a personal encounter with a fisher - a member of the family that includes weasels, otters, mink, badgers, ferrets, martens, and wolverines - where there were supposed to be none. It "eats squirrels like candy, can kill a dog in less than a second, and scoops the belly-meat out of a porcupine like it was a breakfast melon."

*Helen Fields - Respected Paleontologist Mary Schweitzer (also a Christian) has discovered blood vessels and structures that look like whole cells in Tyrannosaurus Rex bones. Any text on fossils will tell you soft tissue does not survive 68 million years. "Aha!" say the creationists. "We told you God created the earth less than 10,000 years ago." Schweitzer sees no conflict between her faith and good science and is not impressed. Creationists "twist your words and manipulate your data," she says.

*Patricia Gadsby - The only essay chosen for both books, about the use of chemistry in the preparation of a wide variety of fine cuisine. For example, a "ten-minute egg" means nothing, but the 65-degree egg is unlike any the author has ever eaten. When an egg cooks, its proteins first unwind, then link to form a mesh, the flavor of which varies with temperature.

James Gleick - The making of the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary - complicated by accelerated language change due to the internet. A treat for the linguistics nut.

*John Horgan - The author claims that scientists have solved most of the major mysteries of nature - that what remains are just "filling in the blanks," technological advances, and further elaboration of already well-described basic science. This view, wrongly advocated by many in the past, has now been labeled "Horganism" by his critics. A very interesting essay, whether or not you agree with Horgan.

*William Langewiesche - The politics, science, and logistics of what it would take for a group of terrorists to acquire the materials for and make a nuclear weapon - not that easy. This is an eye-opening article.

*Jonah Lehrer - Giraffes, dolphins, whales, and manatees have all-male orgies. Japanese macaques are ardent lesbians and bonobos are a close second. This is an attack on Darwinian sexual selection by Joan Roughgarden, professor of biology at Stanford. She documents a wealth of bisexual activity throughout the animal kingdom in her book, "Evolution's Rainbow," and claims her critics are unfairly accusing her of bias because she is transgendered.

*Michael Lemonick - With significant advances in telescope technology, cosmologists are getting close to answering questions about the formations of the first galaxies - factories for creation of the elements. Perhaps this will happen with the next great generation of telescopes.

*Jeffrey Lockwood - A memoir of entomologist Jeff LaFage, complete with details of the arms race and incredible violence among insects. Indeed, violence is the baseline strategy for most encounters between and within species. Extremely well-written with a tragic surprise ending.

*Lynn Margulis & Emily Case - Earth's environment is largely the product of bacterial metabolism. Whereas humans have occupied earth for only .003% of its existence, bacteria have been around for 80%. "If Life had a yearbook, bacteria would win all the awards, especially `most likely to succeed.'"

*Steve Olson - A memoir of Svante Paabo, DNA researcher who was the first to analyze DNA from Neanderthals, identified "Mitochondrial Eve," was acknowledged for his scientific contributions to "Jurassic Park," sequenced DNA from the 1991 find of the 35,000 year-old "Ice Man," and investigated a mutation in the FOX2P gene in an affected English family. Paabo is happy for the medical and research benefits from his work, but says, "I'm driven by curiosity."

*Michael Perry - Captivating writing, as the author is led, step by step, through an autopsy. Pathologists pick up on dead-man trends the rest of us never contemplate. "I love motorcycles, but you'll never catch me on one - at the last crack-up I responded to, I had to pull slivers of femur out of a car door....Of all the organs that can kill a young man, the brain ranks high. For one thing, it is responsible for decisions like, `Hey! Let's bumpersurf naked!'"

Heather Pringle - A memoir of Assien Bohmers, one of Hitler's archeologists, who sacrificed scientific principles in order to "prove" the superiority of the Germanic race. Like many other members of Hitler's regime, Bohmers later attempted to whitewash himself as a fierce opponent of the Nazis.

*Jonathan Rauch - A team introduces personal drama to video-games with their game, "Façade," winning at a major trade convention. Influenced by, among other dramas, "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolff," the characters are conniving to draw you in. There is no violence, but plenty of plot swings, directed by the "drama manager" software, and following the lead of the player. They believe that today's video games occupy only a fraction of the potential market for interactive video entertainment. Captivating!

*Michael Rosenwald - A memoir of Robert Webster, perhaps the world's leading avian-flu-chasing virologist. Webster thinks the pig is the key to potentially causing a catastrophic epidemic. The pig easily gets the flu from people and easily gets avian flu from birds. All that has to happen is for a pig to get both viruses at the same time, for the viruses to share their DNA, and for a new strain capable of human to human infection to emerge.

Bonnie Rough - A clever rendering of how differing species vary in how they use their allotted space, for example....the arctic tern migrates between the North and South Poles, a journey of 10,000 miles twice a year....hermit crabs have an inadequate supply of shells to live in. When a new large shell is found, they converge, but then a remarkably civil event occurs. They line up in order of size. The largest crab vacates his shell and takes the new one. The next in line vacates his slightly smaller shell and takes the one newly vacated - and so on down the line till every crab has a roomier new home....More than a million Americans live in their RV's.

Robert Sapolsky - Opens with a family letter about a wedding. The guests were interested in all the usual things, but mainly sniffing everything, including each other. Yes, it was a dog's wedding. What ensues is the story of how, compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, we have lost most of our olfactory sense.

John Seabrook - How ornithologist Pamela Rasmussen painstakingly uncovered and reconstructed the fraudulent scientific activity of the late eminent British ornithologist, Richard Meinertzhagen.

Bill Sherwonit - The author and his friend, Sam, face a surprised and angry bear with her cubs. He says, "The last thing I see is the bear engulfing Sam." Miraculously, Sam is virtually uninjured. "Thank goodness it was a friendly bear," Sam says. "It wasn't looking for a fight; it was just trying to make a point: `Leave me alone.'" The author goes on to describe episodes from years of bear watching in Alaska.

Michael Shnayerson - The Appalachian mountain ridgetops in West Virginia are being exploded, bulldozed, and mined for coal. The corporations site their operations well away from the interstates, even a ridge or two away from the county roads, for obvious reasons. This type of mining doesn't require many employees, so jobs can't be the excuse. Except for a few diehards who fight back with lawsuits, the politicians and the courts seem to be in the hip pockets of the coal industry. Absolutely disgusting!

*Meredith Small - A memoir of Luca Cavalli-Sforza, who uses the DNA of modern people to trace the movement of humanity out of Africa and their diaspora around the world. Many protestors, suspecting racial motives, have thrown up roadblocks, but Luca is adamant that no one is trying to victimize anyone. He and his team only want to understand the genetics of human populations.

*Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala - For two centuries now, humans have been transferring carbon from below the surface of the earth to the atmosphere, with what look to be undesirable effects for plant, animal, and human life. The authors present a 50-year plan for slowing this trend, using existing technology. This is a short article everyone should read. Most of their recommendations are bound to be eventually adopted. Hopefully, that will be sooner rather than later.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson - With his usual chatty style, Tyson discusses the stagnation of the manned space flight program, due partly to funding shortfalls. The three main drivers of an undertaking this expensive has historically been war, greed, or religion. Religion has lost its hold on the state. Greed and war can go hand in hand, but war itself remains the ultimate and most compelling rationale. When the cold war ended, NASA lost its main excuse for the exorbitant funding necessary for manned space exploration.

*Ethan Watters - Our DNA is the instruction book but the genes themselves need instructions for what to do. Enter the world of epigenetics, a complex software system capable of controlling the DNA hardware. It consists of the histones that cover the DNA in chromosomes and methylation sites on the histones that assist in turning genes on and off. Surprise discovery: the environment may be able to influence the epigenetic software and that change may be passed on to the next generation, without changing a single gene sequence. This is distinctively non-Darwinian and is bound to fuel a resurgence of the nature vs nurture debate.