The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010 Read online

  The Best American Science and Nature Writing™ 2010

  Freeman Dyson

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  ...

  ...

  ...

  Copyright

  Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  ANDREW CORSELLO The Believer

  TOM WOLFE One Giant Leap to Nowhere

  STEVEN WEINBERG The Missions of Astronomy

  TIMOTHY FERRIS Cosmic Vision

  TIMOTHY FERRIS Seeking New Earths

  PART TWO

  JONAH LEHRER Don't!

  KATHLEEN MCGOWAN Out of the Past

  JOHN COLAPINTO Brain Games

  PART THREE

  GUSTAVE AXELSON The Alpha Accipiter

  DON STAP Flight of the Kuaka

  MATT RIDLEY Modern Darwins

  TIM FLANNERY The Superior Civilization

  KENNETH BROWER Still Blue

  JANE GOODALL The Lazarus Effect

  DAVID QUAMMEN Darwin's First Clues

  PART FOUR

  JIM CARRIER All You Can Eat

  FELIX SALMON A Formula for Disaster

  DAWN STOVER Not So Silent Spring

  ELIZABETH KOLBERT The Catastrophist

  ELIZABETH KOLBERT The Sixth Extinction?

  PART FIVE

  ROBERT KUNZIG Scraping Bottom

  MICHAEL SPECTER A Life of Its Own

  BRIAN BOYD Purpose-Driven Life

  PHILIP GOUREVITCH The Monkey and the Fish

  PART SIX

  RICHARD MANNING Graze Anatomy

  BURKHARD BILGER Hearth Surgery

  EVAN OSNOS Green Giant

  GEORGE BLACK India, Enlightened

  ...

  Contributors' Notes

  Other Notable Science and Nature Writing of 2009

  Edited and with an Introduction

  by Freeman Dyson

  Tim Folger, Series Editor

  A Mariner Original

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT

  BOSTON • NEW YORK 2010

  Copyright © 2010 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

  Introduction copyright © 2010 by Freeman Dyson

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  "The Alpha Accipiter" by Gustave Axelson. First published in Minnesota Conserva-

  tion Volunteer, March/April 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Minnesota Department of

  Natural Resources. Reprinted by permission of Minnesota Conservation Volunteer, bi-

  monthly magazine of the Department of Natural Resources.

  "Hearth Surgery" by Burkhard Bilger. Originally published in The New Yorker, De-

  cember 21 & 28, 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Burkhard Bilger. Reprinted by permis-

  sion of Burkhard Bilger.

  "India, Enlightened" by George Black. Originally published in OnEarth, Sum-

  mer 2009. Copyright © 2009 by George Black. Reprinted by permission of Douglas

  Barasch, editor in chief, OnEarth magazine.

  "Purpose-Driven Life" by Brian Boyd. Originally published in The American

  Scholar, Spring 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Brian Boyd. Reprinted by permission of

  Georges Borchardt, Inc.

  "Still Blue" by Kenneth Brower. First published in National Geographic, March

  2009. Copyright © 2009 by National Geographic Society. Reprinted by permission

  of the National Geographic Society.

  "All You Can Eat" by Jim Carrier. First published in Orion, March/April 2009.

  Copyright © 2009 by Jim Carrier. Reprinted by permission of Jim Carrier.

  "Brain Games" by John Colap into. First published in The New Yorker, May 11,

  2009. Copyright © 2009 by John Colapinto. Reprinted by permission of The New

  Yorker.

  "The Believer" by Andrew Corsello. First published in GQ February 2009. Copy-

  right © 2009 by Andrew Corsello. Reprinted by permission of Andrew Corsello.

  "Cosmic Vision" by Timothy Ferris. First published in National Geographic, July

  2009. Copyright © 2009 by National Geographic Society. Reprinted by permission

  of the National Geographic Society.

  "Seeking New Earths" by Timothy Ferris. First published in National Geographic,

  December 2009. Copyright © 2009 by National Geographic Society. Reprinted by

  permission of the National Geographic Society.

  "The Superior Civilization" by Tim Flannery. First published in The New York Re-

  view of Books, February 26, 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Tim Flannery. Reprinted by permission of Tim Flannery.

  "The Lazarus Effect" from Hope for Animals and Their World, by Jane Goodall with

  Thane Maynard and Gail Hudson. First published in Discover, September 2009.

  Copyright © 2009 by Jane Goodall and Thane Maynard. By permission of Grand

  Central Publishing.

  "The Monkey and the Fish" by Philip Gourevitch. First published in The New

  Yorker, December 21 & 28, 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Philip Gourevitch. Reprinted

  by permission.

  "The Catastrophist" by Elizabeth Kolbert. First published in The New Yorker, June

  29, 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Elizabeth Kolbert. Reprinted by permission of Eliza-

  beth Kolbert.

  "The Sixth Extinction?" by Elizabeth Kolbert. First published in The New Yorker,

  May 25, 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Elizabeth Kolbert. Reprinted by permission of

  Elizabeth Kolbert.

  "Scraping Bottom" by Robert Kunzig. First published in National Geographic,

  March 2009. Copyright © 2009 by National Geographic Society. Reprinted by per-

  mission of the National Geographic Society.

  "Don't!" by Jonah Lehrer. First published in The New Yorker, May 18, 2009. Copy-

  right © 2009 by Jonah Lehrer. Reprinted by permission of Jonah Lehrer.

  "Graze Anatomy" by Richard Manning. First published in OnEarth, Spring 2009.

  Copyright © 2009 by OnEarth. Reprinted by permission of Richard Manning.

  "Out of the Past" by Kathleen McGowan. First published in Discover, July/August

/>   2009. Copyright © 2009 by Kathleen McGowan. Reprinted by permission of the au-

  thor.

  "Green Giant" by Evan Osnos. First published in The New Yorker, December 21 &

  28, 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Evan Osnos. Reprinted by permission of The New

  Yorker.

  "Darwin's First Clues" by David Quammen. First published in National Geographic,

  February 2009. Copyright © 2009 by David Quammen. Reprinted by permission of

  David Quammen.

  "Modern Darwins" by Matt Ridley. First published in National Geographic, Febru-

  ary 2009. Copyright © 2009 by National Geographic Society. Reprinted by permis-

  sion of the National Geographic Society.

  "A Formula for Disaster" by Felix Salmon. Originally published in Wired Maga-

  zine, March 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Felix Salmon. Reprinted by permission of

  the author.

  "A Life of Its Own" by Michael Specter. First published in The New Yorker, Septem-

  ber 28, 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Michael Specter. Reprinted by permission of The

  New Yorker.

  "Flight of the Kuaka" by Don Stap. First published in Living Bird, Autumn 2009.

  Copyright © 2009 by Don Stap. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Not So Silent Spring" by Dawn Stover. First published in Conservation Magazine,

  January–March 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Dawn Stover. Reprinted by permission

  of the author.

  "The Missions of Astronomy" by Steven Weinberg. First published in The New

  York Review of Books, October 22, 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Steven Weinberg. Re-

  printed by permission of Steven Weinberg.

  "One Giant Leap to Nowhere" by Tom Wolfe. First published in The New York

  Times, July 19, 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Tom Wolfe. Reprinted by permission of

  the author.

  Contents

  Foreword [>]

  Introduction by FREEMAN DYSON [>]

  Part One: Visions of Space

  ANDREW CORSELLO. The Believer [>]

  from GQ

  TOM WOLFE. One Giant Leap to Nowhere [>]

  from The New York Times

  STEVEN WEINBERG. The Missions of Astronomy [>]

  from The New York Review of Books

  TIMOTHY FERRIS. Cosmic Vision [>]

  from National Geographic

  TIMOTHY FERRIS. Seeking New Earths [>]

  from National Geographic

  Part Two: Neurology Displacing Molecular Biology

  JONAH LEHRER. Don't! [>]

  from The New Yorker

  KATHLEEN MCGOWAN. Out of the Past [>]

  from Discover

  JOHN COLAPINTO. Brain Games [>]

  from The New Yorker

  Part Three: Natural Beauty

  GUSTAVE AXELSON. The Alpha Accipiter [>]

  from Minnesota Conservation Volunteer

  DON STAP. Flight of the Kuaka [>]

  from Living Bird

  MATT RIDLEY. Modern Darwins [>]

  from National Geographic

  TIM FLANNERY. The Superior Civilization [>]

  from The New York Review of Books

  KENNETH BROWER. Still Blue [>]

  from National Geographic

  JANE GOODALL. The Lazarus Effect [>]

  from Discover

  DAVID QUAMMEN. Darwin's First Clues [>]

  from National Geographic

  Part Four: The Environment: Gloom and Doom

  JIM CARRIER. All You Can Eat [>]

  from Orion

  FELIX SALMON. A Formula for Disaster [>]

  from Wired

  DAWN STOVER. Not So Silent Spring [>]

  from Conservation Magazine

  ELIZABETH KOLBERT. The Catastrophist [>]

  from The New Yorker

  ELIZABETH KOLBERT. The Sixth Extinction? [>]

  from The New Yorker

  Part Five: The Environment: Small Blessings

  ROBERT KUNZIG. Scraping Bottom [>]

  from National Geographic

  MICHAEL SPECTER. A Life of Its Own [>]

  from The New Yorker

  BRIAN BOYD. Purpose-Driven Life [>]

  from The American Scholar

  PHILIP GOUREVITCH. The Monkey and the Fish [>]

  from The New Yorker

  Part Six: The Environment: Big Blessings

  RICHARD MANNING. Graze Anatomy [>]

  from OnEarth

  BURKHARD BILGER. Hearth Surgery [>]

  from The New Yorker

  EVAN OSNOS. Green Giant [>]

  from The New Yorker

  GEORGE BLACK. India, Enlightened [>]

  from OnEarth

  Contributors' Notes [>]

  Other Notable Science and Nature Writing of 2009 [>]

  Foreword

  REMEMBER THE WAY the future was supposed to be? The path to tomorrow once seemed so clear, its trajectory limned for the entire world to see in billowing plumes of rocket exhaust in the blue sky over Cape Canaveral. We would become, President Kennedy declared in 1962, a spacefaring nation, destined—even obligated—to explore what he called "this new ocean." I had barely entered grade school at the time, but I vividly remember watching the launches of the Mercury and Gemini missions and the equally dramatic splashdowns—in those days all manned American spacecraft landed in the ocean, their descent slowed by enormous orange-and-white-striped parachutes. By the late 1960s, astronauts—and cosmonauts—had walked in space; the first moon landing was at hand. We had come so far so quickly: less than sixty years separated the Wright brothers' first flight and John Glenn's solo orbit of Earth in Friendship 7, his closet-size Mercury capsule. No doubt we'd make even greater leaps in the next sixty years. By the year 2000? A spinning, spoked space station staffed by hundreds was a given; travel to the moon routine; footprints on the red sand of Mars—of course. To my second-grade mind it all seemed closer and more imaginable than my own adulthood.

  The space odyssey that once seemed so inevitable never came to pass. Today, more than forty years after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, we're unable to follow him there. The thirty-six-story-tall Saturn rockets that made such trips possible no longer exist, and nothing of comparable power has replaced them. For now—perhaps quite a long now—we're confined to orbiting Earth. Mars, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and destinations beyond will have to wait for their first human visitors. My eight-year-old self would have been sorely disappointed. He certainly didn't get the future he expected. On the other hand, he would have been astonished to learn that he would one day own a computer far more powerful than the ones carried aboard the Apollo spacecraft.

  Science has a seemingly bottomless capacity to astonish, a quality unmatched, I think, by any other human endeavor. It thrives on unanticipated results and anomalous data. Some months ago, before I knew that Freeman Dyson would be the guest editor for this anthology, I had the pleasure of interviewing him while working on an assignment for Discover. Toward the end of our conversation I asked if any single discovery had most surprised him during his long career. (He will turn eighty-seven in December 2010.)

  "Everything has been surprising," he said. "Science is just organized unpredictability. If it were predictable it wouldn't be science. Everywhere you look ... I didn't expect personal computers. Like you, I thought by now we would be tramping around on Mars with heavy boots. I did not foresee that we'd be sending unmanned instruments with huge bandwidth into space. It's all been a surprise in a way. It's even more true in biology. I had no conception of the fact that we would actually read genomes the way we're doing it now. I remember when it took a year to sequence one protein. Now it's done in a few seconds. I would say there's almost nothing in science that I've predicted correctly. I hope it will continue that way; I think it's very likely it will. Really important things will happen in the next fifty years that nobody has imagined."

  Tom Wolfe, one o
f the contributors to this year's anthology, would argue that we should resume our pursuit of the future we imagined forty years ago. In "One Giant Leap to Nowhere," he decries the premature end of the "greatest, grandest ... quest in the history of the world": America's manned space program. Even if you don't agree with Wolfe that humanity must travel to the stars, it's impossible after reading his spirited and witty story not to wonder what the world would have been like today if the Apollo missions to the moon had marked the beginning rather than the end of a dream.

  While a large part of me yearns to embrace Wolfe's vision, my sensible side yields to the arguments Steven Weinberg makes in "The Missions of Astronomy." Weinberg is an eminent physicist; he won a Nobel Prize for his work in describing some of the fundamental forces of the universe. He is also a passionate and eloquent essayist. In these pages he writes that manned missions to other worlds would hinder rather than advance science. But his remarkable article covers a great deal more than the merits of manned space exploration, ranging gracefully from Socrates to sextants to the Standard Model of physics.

  We'll probably never reach the stars—our fastest existing space probes would need tens of thousands of years to get to the nearest one—but we may well be close to discovering whether life exists elsewhere in the universe. To date astronomers have found more than 370 planets orbiting other stars. None of those exoplanets resemble Earth—most are gassy giants, far bigger than Jupiter. But most astronomers believe that Earthlike planets must be fairly common in our galaxy. In "Seeking New Earths," Timothy Ferris writes about the search for planets like our own and how a new generation of telescopes may be able to find signs of life on some of them.

  The remaining stories in this collection are all about one planet, which is facing challenges that no one conceived of forty years ago. Elizabeth Kolbert, who edited this anthology last year, describes a dangerous organism that threatens all life on Earth: us. Several articles collected here show how we might yet reverse some of the worst aspects of the catastrophes we've set in motion. Freeman Dyson has much more to say about that in the next few pages, but I can't help wondering which of these stories will, decades from now, turn out to have accurately glimpsed our future and which will be relegated to the what-might-have-beens.

  I hope that readers, writers, and editors will nominate their favorite articles for next year's anthology at http://timfolger.net/ forums. The criteria for submissions and deadlines, and the address to which entries should be sent, can be found in the "news and announcements" forum on my website. Once again this year I'm offering an incentive to readers to scour the nation in search of good science and nature writing: send me an article that I haven't found, and if the article makes it into the anthology, I'll mail you a free copy of next year's edition, signed by the guest editor. I'll even sign it as well, which will augment its value immeasurably. (A true statement, by the way, there being no measurable difference between copies signed by me and those unsigned.) I also encourage readers to use the forums to leave feedback about the collection and to discuss all things scientific. The best way for publications to guarantee that their articles are considered for inclusion in the anthology is to place me on their subscription list, using the address posted in the news and announcements section of the forums.