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Evolving Fish, A Dying Sea, And A New Genre: Digital Comics Science Journalism

Symbolia. First issue free. Subsequent individual issues $1.99. Annual subscription $11.99. Available as an iPad app or pdf; other devices to come. See web site for details. 

Comics first gained respectability as art, then as storytelling, and more recently as comics journalism. Joe Sacco's celebrated Safe Area Goradze, for example, showed how comics journalism could deliver powerful portrait of life during wartime. Published in 2001, Safe Area Goradze was the product of a pre-ebook age, the sort of printed work that you might buy as a deluxe hardbound edition and display on a shelf. A decade later, comics journalists are increasingly giving up paper and going digital.

A new example of this new genre is Symbolia, a magazine that released its first issue this week. It's been generating a good deal of buzz, with write-ups in venues like the Columbia Journalism Review, Poynter, and Publisher's Weekly. I decided to check it out and discovered a creation that was fit for reviewing at Download the Universe. That's because three out of the five stories in the first edition are about science.

A Disorganized Celebration of Skulls

SKULLS. 2011 by Simon Winchester. Touch Press. iPad. App webpage.

Reviewed by Brian Switek

No set of bones better exemplifies the natural history of an animal than its skull. Postcranial skeletons are all well and good – the vertebrae, limbs, and associated parts all testify to how an animal moved and behaved – but skulls are the most iconic aspects of a creature’s ossified frame. The skull is the seat of the brain, and, therefore, the senses, and the critical details of how an organism perceived its world can be detected from this complex arrangement of bones. As much as any group of bones can, a skull summarizes the essence of an organism - to draw from my beloved non-avian dinosaurs, a Tyrannosaurus or Triceratops skeleton would just not seem as magnificent without their fantastic, iconic skulls attached.

Not everyone shares my affection for skulls. I learned this the hard way. A few years ago, I spotted a bleached raccoon skull along the side of a trail in the New Jersey woods. I put the skull in my camera bag, carried it home, and put the cranium in my desk drawer. Fortunately for me, my wife has been very kind about my fascination with bones and thought nothing of it. But when my wife’s best friend was petsitting at our apartment a few months later, and said friend opened my desk in search of a pen, she was horrified to see raccoon remains staring back up at her. To me, the skull was a representation of the raccoon’s life and evolution, but she saw the skull as a symbol of death and decay.

Simon Winchester’s Skulls – an ebook-iPad app hybrid – explores the various meanings of the haunting bones. Skulls are objects of natural history, have been misappropriated to support discrimination, and can act as warnings of impending doom. What a skull means rests in the eye of the beholder (and those eyes, of course, are set into skulls themselves.)

Skulls was not what I was expecting. I thought the app was going to be a virtual museum of various specimens that users would be able to manipulate to get a better look at the various components of the craniums. And while there is that aspect to the program, Skulls tries to be more.

Each of the app's interactive skull images is organized within twelve different sections which focus on cranial components, how the bones are collected, and the cultural meaning of skulls. In the introduction, which outlines what a skull is, a series of representative specimens stream past on the right side of the screen as Winchester explains on the left, with certain keywords linked to particular skulls. (Users can read at their own pace, or choose to have Winchester read to them in his halting cadence.) On that first page, the word “majesty” is linked to one of the fabricated crystal skulls which led Steven Spielberg to run the Indiana Jones franchise into the ground, and the simple mention of “skulls” at the bottom corresponds to the strange cranial architecture of a long-spine porcupinefish. The piscine skull looks like good inspiration for one of H.R. Geiger’s techno-biological horrors.

There’s more than one way to explore the selected skulls. Readers can proceed linearly through each of the twelve short sections, they can hit the “gallery” button at the top of the screen to explore the highlighted skulls in each section, or can simply tap “The Collection” on the main page to bring up a constantly-rotating collection of alphabetized skulls. The best part of the latter option is the ability to view multiple skulls side-by-side via the “compare” button. The saber-fanged weapons of a Smilodon look all the more fearsome when viewed directly next to the much shorter, stouter canines of its distant, living relative, the lion.

But this is also the most frustrating feature of Skulls – the app only allows users to zoom in and rotate along the horizontal axis. You can’t flip the skulls to have a look underneath, or explode skulls to play with their various parts. With a little more effort, Skulls could have acted as a rich, virtual reference for anatomy students or anyone interested in learning more about osteology, natural history, and evolution. Instead, Skulls is more of a virtual museum – you can look, but your ability to learn directly from the bones is severely constrained. (Ironically, the publisher of Skulls, Touch Press, lets you to flip planets and moons in another of their apps, The Solar System, which we reviewed last month.)

Though limited, the app’s gallery of spinning skulls is fun to fiddle around with. The ebook portion only left me puzzled. While I greatly enjoyed the format of having parts of the text correspond directly to the stream of skulls on the right side of the virtual page, there was no central narrative or story. Winchester jumps from a general overview of skulls to a profile of skull collector Adam Dudley before moving on to bizarre cranial modifications and the meaning of osteological iconography. There is no flow between sections – they all stand on their own and vary in style. “A Skull’s Component Parts” – in which Winchester avoids actually describing the various bones which make up a skull – is presented in an encyclopedia format, while Winchester’s visit to the skull of 17^th century Ottoman military leader Kara Mustafa Pasha was composed as part history and part travelogue. And section 6 – “The Skull of the Dodo” – feels entirely out of place. Winchester says almost nothing about dodo skulls, and instead recapitulates the extinction and artistic representations of the extinction icon.

Strangest of all, Winchester goes on a brief tear about paleoanthropology in the “Science and Pseudoscience” portion of the book. After addressing how some misguided researchers used craniometry to buoy their own racist notions, as well as recapitulating the Piltdown Man scandal, Winchester settles into a wandering discussion of human evolution. “It can fairly be said,” Winchester writes, “that in the history of biological science never has so much been imagined by so many on the evidence of so little than those who have studied the skull and wondered about human evolution.” Granted, specimens of fossil humans are rare and often quite fragmentary, but Winchester does nothing to support his claim that much of what we think we know about our ancestors is “imagined.” Indeed, rather than support his claim, Winchester quickly moves on to say that the human skull has changed only little in the past three million years and that human evolution has ultimately halted. The first statement feels contradictory to the rest of the section – in which Winchester mentions how brain size, brow ridges, teeth, and facial construction have changed among our prehistoric kin – and the second assertion is only armchair philosophizing. While changes to our physical form might not be apparent, there is a growing body of scientific evidence that human evolution continues to this very moment and can be tracked in our genes.  

Ultimately, Skulls feels like a disorganized tour of a virtual curiosity cabinet. There are lots of fascinating tidbits along the way, and Winchester shows a clear enthusiasm for his subject, but I reached the bottom of the last page without understanding what the point of the entire exercise was. Skulls is a disorganized celebration of cranial bones and is of little utility as a reference. I couldn’t help but laugh in disagreement when, in the last section, the app dubbed itself “a near-perfect survey” of skulls. The mashup of biography, history, editorial, and encyclopedic catalog made Skulls feel like a concept stretched too thin and spread too wide. Unlike an actual skull, the app’s various components never come together to create a functioning whole.

 

Brian Switek is a freelance science writer and author of the book Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature. He regularly blogs about paleontology at the WIRED Science blog Laelaps and the Smithsonian blog Dinosaur Tracking. His next book - A Date With a Dinosaur: On the Road With Old Bones, New Science, and My Beloved Brontosaurus - will be published next year by Scientific American/FSG.

Slog of the Dinosaurs

March of the Dinosaurs. 2011 by Touch Press. iPad. App webpage.

Reviewed by Brian Switek

Dinosaurs have changed a hell of a lot since I was a kid. My beloved “Brontosaurus” was beheaded and recast as Apatosaurus, Torosaurus might just be the spectacular mature form of Triceratops, and we now know that many dinosaurs were covered in lavish, colorful plumage. I like it. There are plenty of complaints about how paleontologists are ruining cherished childhood memories by altering our understanding of dinosaur lives, but all the immature whining misses the grander point. We know more about dinosaurs lives than ever before, and the more we learn, the stranger and more wonderful the creatures become.

Dinosaurs trodding through the snow is one of my favorite new images. For as long as I can remember, Stegosaurus and company were presented as inhabitants of steaming jungles choked with ferns, cycads, and horsetails. Rudolph Zallinger’s gorgeous mural The Age of Reptiles at Yale and the short, dinosaur-filled segment of Disney’s Fantasia left no doubt in my young mind that dinosaurs lived in a seemingly endless global summer. But this was a holdover from the idea that dinosaurs were sluggish ectotherms that required considerable heat to start up every morning. Not only have such swamp-bound monsters been given a makeover, but a better understanding of the habitats dinosaurs occupied has altered our previous understanding of the world tyrannosaurs, ceratopsians, and their ilk lived in.

Continuing research in Alaska, for example, has even turned up dinosaurs which lived within the Arctic circle. These dinosaurs were not outcasts or vacationers, but part of complex communities which permanently made their homes up north, including everything from the svelte tyrannosaur Gorgosaurus to the feathered, switchblade-clawed raptor Troodon and plenty of Pachyrhinosaurus – a magnificent horned dinosaur with bony hooks jutting from its frill and a big, lumpy boss on its nose. And while prehistoric Alaska was a titch watmer than today, there was still snow and many months of darkness. Here, dinosaurs once slogged through Cretaceous snowstorms.

A paleo drama about these chilled archosaurs – titled March of the Dinosaurs – was released by Impossible Pictures last year. It was another Walking With Dinosaurs wannabe – all computer-generated violence, very little science. I love a feather-covered, acrobatic Albertosaurus sailing through the air with claws extended as much as anyone else, but, without any explanation of how we have come to know of this animal’s existence, the dinosaur is just another special effect. But when fellow Download the Universe contributor Deborah Blum told me there was a March of the Dinosaurs app for the iPad, I felt a stirring of hope. Maybe, with the interactivity an iPad allows, some of the glossy effects might be combined with some scientific explanation.

One man and his superorganism

Before the Swarm, by Nicholas Griffin. The Atavist, 2011 (Atavist app for iPhone or iPad/ Kindle/ Nook/ iBook/ Kobo)

Reviewed by Ed Yong

 

When we first meet Mark Moffett, the man at the centre of Before the Swarm, he is grinning about a botfly maggot that has died in his hand. Not in the palm of his hand, mind you, but implanted within the flesh.

The rest of the tale – the third in The Atavist’s growing stable of long-form non-fiction – proceeds along similar lines. 

Nicholas Griffin narrates the life of an ant-loving scientist who self-describes as “Dr Bugs”, plays at both journalism and photography, and frequently disappears on long jungle odysseys. He loves the world’s most painful insect, but he loathes universities. Standing outside of the scientific establishment, he has been criticised for favouring mass media and compelling stories over testing hypotheses and collecting data. There is a compelling counterpoint, which Griffin notes early on, between the ants, whose societies revolve around “hierarchy and specialisation” and Moffett, who “can’t seem to stand either one”.

Griffin’s writing is wonderfully lean and evocative. When Moffett speaks, it is with tight snippets of dialogue (he introduces his parasite with “Have you met my botfly?” and greets the legendary E. O. Wilson with “Hi Ed”). When he is described, it is with tight, unadorned prose.

Then again, one gets the sense that Moffett doesn’t require much embellishment. He’s a writer’s dream protagonist: quotable, possessed of a rebellious streak, and prone to misadventure. He electrocutes himself! He gets kidnapped! He’s been bitten! There is a real risk here that the tale could descends into a list of amusing anecdotes – less a cohesive story, and more The Continuing and Wacky Adventures of Mark Moffett.

But just when Before the Swarm starts to veer down that direction, Griffin hits you with genuine tragedy at the midpoint. I’ll stop short of explicit spoilers but it involves the quote, “That’s a fucking krait.” It’s a turning point, and Griffin deals with it well, giving it room to breathe and ramify. It changes the feel of the earlier lists of derring-do from a Boy’s Own adventure into a tally of genuinely dangerous pursuits.

Then, in the second half, after much time with the man’s history and exploits, his ideas finally get a chance to shine. Sadly, they merely flicker. Here, arguably where it matters most, Moffett becomes a bit-player in his own story.

We learn that, riffing off E.O. Wilson, Moffett thinks that human and ant societies both follow similar rules, and develop similar features, as they get bigger. And we’re told that this is a “fresh idea” even though it feels somewhat familiar.

We’re told that Moffett advocates the idea of ant colonies as superorganisms – that is, they behave like a single being. The superlatively successful Argentine ants are the prime example: its colonies contain billions or even trillions of individuals, genetically similar and spread across entire states. But while Griffin writes about the theory’s origins a century ago, and we meet another scientist who has “written nearly 50 papers on the subject”, Moffett’s own contribution remains quite vague. Griffin says that he is “looking to move beyond simple metaphors” but then relies heavily on metaphors that liken ants to white blood cells and urban humans. The very idea of a superorganism is itself a metaphor.

The scientifically minded reader is then left with many questions. What does it actually say about ants to treat a colony as a single organism? What insights or testable predictions come of it? How has our hero actually advanced the science of superorganisms? None of these is clear. He is probably embroiled in a meaty intellectual debate, but it never truly surfaces. A fellow scientist criticises the idea of an Argentine ant supercolony for untold reasons, and Moffett is later seen attempting to dismantle the critique on untold grounds. In lieu of details, we’re left with the idea of a superorganism as nothing more than a neat framing device, rather than the dogma-shaking “controversial theory” that the standfirst promises.

We might have expected it. The first third of the story, after all, is devoted to telling us how Moffett has a predilection for evocative ideas over solid hypotheses. It’s still a sting in an otherwise great story, but ultimately it’s not a deal-breaker. While Before the Swarm fails as the story of a brave new idea, it amply succeeds as a profile of a fascinating man.

And it ends with a video of a maggot erupting from the skin of its protagonist. That helps too.

*****

Ed Yong is a British science writer who writes the award-winning blog Not Exactly Rocket Science. His work has appeared in Nature, New Scientist, the BBC, the Guardian, the Times, Wired UK, Discover, CNN, Slate, the Daily Telegraph, the Economist and more. He lives in London with his wife. He has never been impregnated by a botfly but he does rather like ants.

The Germ Theory of Cancer

Controlling Cancer: A Powerful Plan for Taking On the World's Most Daunting Disease, by Paul Ewald. TED Books, 2012. (Kindle/Nook/ iBookstore)

There's an inescapability about cancer. It can feel more like fate than a disease. People who smoke can't help but wonder when a cell in their lungs will go rogue and produce a tumor. Living near a toxic dump gives people the sense that someone is playing Russian Roullette with their children, and sooner or later the bullet is going to fire. If you are a woman from a family of breast cancer victims, you can almost hear the clock ticking.

But we must not forget that some cancers are less like fate than they are like the flu. Take cervical cancer. It can't be blamed on bad genes or exposure to chemicals. It's caused by a virus. The human papillomavirus thrives by infecting epithelial cells. It disables their brakes, so that the cells grow faster than normal. To avoid being discovered by the immune system, HPV cloaks host cells so that they appear normal. Most people carry harmless strains of HPV. Your eyelashes are probably coated in them. They don't make the vast majority of their hosts sick because we strike a balance with the viruses. We are constantly shucking off the top layer of epithelial cells from our skin and other surfaces. Infected cells typically don't stick around long enough to cause us trouble. But every now and then, HPV will push a cell on the path to runaway growth and, ultimately, cancer.

Paul Ewald, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Louisville, thinks that we need to let this fact sink in. Most of the research on new cancer treatments goes into searching for ways to blast tumors. This is an expensive strategy that yields relatively little benefit, Ewald argues. Chemotherapy drugs can have awful side effects, and the cancer itself can adapt to the medicine through a nefarious form of natural selection. Mutations that make cancer cells more resistant to the chemotherapy take over the tumor. But if we could stop a significant chunk of cancers in the same way we battle viruses, the fight against cancer may have gotten a whole lot more promising.

In Controlling Cancer, Ewald argues that HPV is far from alone as a cancer-causing pathogen. He points to hepatitis viruses, which are known to cause liver cancer, and the bacteria Helicobacter pylori, which lives in the human stomach and can cause gastic cancer. It stands to reason, Ewald argues, that a lot of the pathogens that make us sick also push us towards cancer. For many viruses, bacteria, protozoans, and animal parasites, it pays to spur cells to replicate quickly and to evade the immune system.

If a lot of cancer is caused by infections, then we may be in a fortunate situation. We can save millions of lives with well-established measures. It doesn't take a miracle drug to block the transmission of hepatitis C, for example. Stopping people from using dirty needles will do just fine. Vaccinations could annihilate some kinds of cancer altogether.

It's a provocative idea, which is par for the course for Ewald. He's long been an advocate for putting medicine on a solid foundation of evolutionary biology. In the 1990s, for example, he came to fame for his ideas about domesticating infectious diseases. The deadliness of a parasite can evolve, and in some situations, it may pay for parasites to be milder instead of meaner. He went on to argue that many supposed chronic diseases--from heart disease to schizophrenia--are triggered by pathogens. Ewald's work has been mostly theoretical--extrapolating from what we know about evolution in general to diseases in particular. His ideas are tough to test, if only because our bodies are so complex. But they have certainly been influential, as scientists have developed better tools for detecting microbes in our bodies and probe their effects on us.

Controlling Cancer is one of the first works published by TED Books--an offshoot of the hugely popular TED talks. (Here's Paul Ewald's 2008 TED talk on domesticating disease.) TED talks are crisp, quick, emphatic, and not too heavy on scientific detail. Their books are, too. Controlling Cancer is a quick read, without any photographs, videos, or other ornaments found on other ebooks. It does include footnotes, where Ewald back up most of his points.

The citations are a good thing, but sometimes it's hard to tell when Ewald citing well-established cases of pathogens causing cancer and when he's only pointing to suggestive hints. The scientific literature is loaded with papers in which researchers describe tumors brimming with viruses. These associations could be evidence of viruses triggering cancer, or they could be evidence that tumors are good places for viruses to breed.

Ewald does point out that this ebook is just a precis of a longer book that's in the works. Controlling Cancer intrigues me enough that I look forward to Ewald making his case in full.

 

Carl Zimmer writes frequently about science for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including A Planet of Viruses

[Image: Dividing lung cancer cell/NIH]