Consideration of Works Present: Zootopia

(Picture from here.)

Zootopia is, of course, the newest Disney animated film. While it is computer generated animation, this is not a Pixar film. It doesn't look like Pixar. It doesn't tell story like Pixar.

If anything, it in some ways feels more like the classic Disney animation of a couple of generations ago: Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, etc. Not in the sense of the story style-- the classic Disney films are products of their time. Zootopia is definitely a product of the 21st century. And, while it does not feel like a Pixar film, John Lasseter, one of the creative forces behind Pixar, is the head of Disney animation so there is some inevitable cross fertilization.
Still, the best Pixar films go after really big themes: fatherhood (Monsters Inc), loss of family and child (Finding Nemo), replacement (Toy Story). They follow the long established path of saying something profound within the confines of a children's story. I heard they made a story about talking cars but upon investigation decided that was mere rumor.

Zootopia is smaller and older. The themes are not so grand and the resolutions not so shattering. At the end of Zootopia, characters are still the same people they started with, wiser and kinder. They still have to get up in the morning and go to the same job. The city has the same problems even though the form of those problems are new. The live happily ever after feeling of a child's story isn't there.

We have to talk about the plot here. I'll try not to spoil it too much but the arc of the story should be fairly obvious to almost anybody from the trailers.
The initial intro and world building shows that the animals believe they evolved to cooperate together. Predator and prey have become friends. The lion doesn't so much lie down with the lamb as they're co-workers in the city.

Judy Hopps is a female rabbit who comes to the city of Zootopia to be a police officer. The big animals are in charge here: rhinos, lions, tigers, hippos, elephants, etc. Judy is the first rabbit to graduate the police academy. So she is, of course, put into parking violations. Step 1: character has to prove herself.

She runs into Duke Weaselton, a fox who's a minor con artist. He's making a good living in Zootopia doing things on the hairy edge of legality. Judy takes on the task of finding a missing otter and stiff arms Duke into helping her. Step 2: budding buddy relationship. Make no mistake. This is a buddy movie.

Step 3: they find the otter but uncover a much larger conspiracy. The otter has reverted to his primitive, predator, self. This is where, I think, Zootopia really ratchets up its SF creds. Not only do we have animals that have human intelligence, their original, animal nature is still there. Humanity is grafted on and someone has found the means to unhook their higher selves and release their lower ones. Further, it initially appears to be permanent.

The rest of the story is how Duke and Judy's friendship breaks and is mended. The proper villains are discovered and dealt with and the afflicted people (predators) treated and cured. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl-- without any possible hint sexual overtones. Duke and Judy become very good, loving, friends.

So I'm going through the first five minutes and don't buy their self-belief at all. I cannot suspend my disbelief that much. If the animals have their known animal nature it had to come from somewhere. If it's still there, it has to have been dealt with.

Now, there are no humans present in the film but, being who I am, it took about forty seconds to spin up the background to this world. These animals may believe they evolved to come together. I know different.

They were made.

These animals were constructed. It happened a long time ago-- long enough that they could create their own myths about it. Humans did it-- who else would uplift cheetahs and gerbils? And then humans did the best thing they could do: they left them alone.

Oh, my God. Zootopia is a science fiction story.

What? you say. There are no SF elements in the story at all.

Not true.

The world of Zootopia is populated by animals that are changed from the quadrapeds we know. They are upright. They have human speech. They have human cognition. They also have their evolutionary heritage. Foxes are still foxes even though they do not eat rabbits.

(In point of fact, eating is not dealt with very much in the film. One wonders if there are food animals that do not have cognition to support this world. Or, like in Varley's Ophiuchi Hotline, plants modified to give carnivores what they need. Do predator animals get that strange feeling we might get when we eat primates? A frisson of connecting to a different past. But I digress.)

Does this sound familiar?

It should. It's the backbone of Cordwainer Smith's work. And David Brin's. It's the idea behind Planet of the Apes and a number of other science fiction books and films.

There's a great line in Smith's Norstrialia where C'Mell, a cat derived girl, tells Roderick, a human disguised as a cat derived man, that her children would not grow up like her without intervention. They would be normal kittens, unaware. Unhuman. The ancient animal history haunts the uplifted animal-- it's all through Zootopia. It's all through science fiction all the way back to The Island of Dr. Moreau. It haunts the characters in Zootopia as well: the idea of predators being overcome by their past nature puts the entire idea of Zootopia at risk. It pits prey and predator against one another.

To me this made the story so much better. It makes the film feel grounded as, I think, the makers desired but not in the way they intended. (I strongly recommend the documentary on Zootopia. It's here. Not a hint of science fiction in any of the staff.)
Why, you might ask, can't I just accept this is another Disney animal movie?

Because it's different from a typical Disney animal movie.

Other such films by Disney (or by other studios) fall into one of two camps: the animals are themselves in their own world as in Zootopia or The Jungle Book. Or the animals are retelling a human story as in Disney's Robin Hood.

If the animals are on their own there has to be a reason for them to exist. In The Secret of Nimh the animals were explicitly uplifted by the National Institute of Mental Health. (NIMH.) TSON is a fun but weak film. It has magic in it and all sorts of such things that crack the story line.

Zootopia does not have this weakness. The story stands or falls on the world building and does not stray from it. There's no magic jewel or sudden enlightenment from On High. Duke and Judy work it out using their own (human derived) brains.

Now, there's no reason in the world a person (other than myself) couldn't enjoy this film as just an allegory. There's a message against bias and preconceptions. The main characters come to realizations that their perception of the world is flawed. There is a strong expression of love at the heart of this film that is very touching.

But, in my opinion, allegory works best as a layer on top of a fully realized story. This is where I think science fiction operates at its finest. It takes the hard processes of technology and science and then weaves a story that allows the allegory to be expressed out of the whole. That contrast of cold and hot is what makes it worthwhile.

I am far too entrenched in biology and evolution to buy animals "evolving" into super-cooperators like people on their own. It hasn't happened all that often in mammals-- mole rats and people are the only true super-cooperators I know. But a made creature? We've done that lots of times, both explicitly in the lab and implicitly in the act of domestication. Uplifting species is something we're going to do, it's just a matter of when and how. And it takes no effort at all to imagine such uplifted species would create a past for themselves. We did. Why wouldn't they?

To me, this gives Zootopia a grounding in my own reality. I can imagine human beings sufficiently advanced creating these creatures and releasing them. Probably more than once-- the first experiments would likely have been disasters. From then on they created their own world. We're just watching.

That said, you don't have to have my backstory to enjoy this film.

Make up your own.

Big and Small

(Picture from here.)

I tend to write small fiction.

By this I mean fiction about characters that do not have a big impact on the world at large. The actions and consequences of my characters rarely extend much beyond the people they know or care about.

This is in contrast to a common theme in the genre: when the consequences of the characters’ actions have a large impact on the world.

Lord of the Rings is an ensemble story where the protagonists are fighting against a foe that will end their lives and the hopes and dreams of their entire world. This is pretty much true of all of the multivolume fantasy and science fiction works recently published. Game of Thrones is about life and death involving wars, famines, zombies and the oncoming unrelenting and ancient winter.

My stories tend to be small. A young man discovering he’s the clone of Gordie Howe. (The Ice) A disillusioned musician regains his love of music from working with a software robot. (Sudden, Broken and Unexpected) An old woman who returns to smoking only to find nanobots singing in her lungs. (The Great Caruso) The world shakes in none of these stories.

This is not to say that big stories where the world changes aren’t fun. I’ve just written very few of them.

There are a number of reasons for this.

For one, I’m interested in what I call moral decisions. These are decisions where a person has to sacrifice something. I call them “moral” decisions because they always require traversing some sort of of internal conflict. Decisions that require no sacrifice have no moral dimension. There’s no moral dimension choosing which flavor of ice cream to eat. There is a moral decision in determining whether or not to eat said ice cream if one is lactose intolerant. A small one, I admit.

This is, I think, why serial killers and other sorts of psychopaths hold little interest for me. I envision a psychopath as someone for whom the decision whether or not to commit violence as being the same sort of decision as to what flavor of ice cream to eat. Or what flavor of ice cream to put on the body—but I digress. The point is that without the moral consequence and the associated self-conflict, the character isn’t interesting.

I like to play with these decision. Little ones. Big ones. How they happen. How do we deal with the effects. What happens when we avoid them. What does it take to commit to such a decision. What does it take not to make one.

Small stories.

Big stories have a large presence in SF and Fantasy. The best ones, in my opinion, are those where the small stories and the big stories blend.

In Bester’s The Stars My Destination we start with a small story of revenge. But as Foyle grows as a human being he discovers capabilities within himself that suggest a change in humanity. In the late Patricia Anthony’s very excellent Brother Termite, the character of Reen is continually wrestling with his own moral behavior in the context of the extinction of both the human race and his own alien species. In both works, the relationships between the characters is what pushes the story forward, not the larger context.

Now, it’s true that every big story is made up of many small stories. But there are a number of works where the big story swallows up all but the faintest traces of its constituent small stories. This is true of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, for example. Most of the Star Wars franchise films are guilty of the same problem. Ditto, The Matrix. As well as nearly all of Michael Chrichton’s novels.

Even though I don’t tend to write them, I have a weakness for big stories with big endings. I just want to traverse small stories to get there.

Ideological Wrestlemania

(Picture from here.)

I'll get back to science eventually.

In the meantime, I've been wrestling with an interesting problem over the last few months.

As anybody who knows me is immediately, I am passionate about science. One of the interesting things about pursuing science is how quickly your own assumptions and biases are skewered. Science-- and the scientific approach-- depends on the idea that ideas are verified in some way. By experiment. By rigorous analysis. This is the basis of peer reviews-- the idea that by subjecting your research to outside observation, the research can be verified.

Engineering has its own approach to this. Designs are inspected. Products are tested. Underneath both disciplines is the idea that verification of a product is independent of emotional attachment to that product. If your car doesn't run, it's not going to sell regardless of how pretty the paint job is.

(Yeah, I know this doesn't always work. There are a lot of products that get bought because they're pretty and not because they function particularly. For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of-- well, you get the idea.)

Personally, I find this approach oddly comforting regardless of the damage to my own assumptions. It's nice to know that ideas have some sort of verisimilitude associated with them other than they sound cool. It's not for everything-- not everything is verifiable. But it's nice to be witness to those things that are.

This approach to things has become natural to me over the years to the point that I've become somewhat blind to people who follow other paradigms.

So: I have a few very intelligent friends that aren't able to deal with some of the more politicized scientific points. A couple of these are global warming and evolution.

Let's be clear on my position: these are done deals.

Global warming has happened, is happening and will continue to happen. It's largely caused by humans and it's going to give human beings an enormous amount of trouble. I'm not going to live to see the full fruits on that tree but my children and grandchildren will. The only question is how fast and how extensive the damage is going to be. It's complex science and the models are not precise enough to pinpoint the full impact. But what they do tell us should be enough for us to try to manage it.

Evolution is even more of a done deal. It is the only model of the history of life on this earth that has stood up to every test. It works everywhere we look.

Both global warming and evolution have stood up to the verification test very well. Global warming made some predictions regarding temperature rise and heat content of the earth. Some panned out directly-- the continually increasing warming trend, for example. Others were refined by new understanding. (See here for a nice discussion.)

Evolution now has a century's track record of making predictions and having them verified. Transitional fossils? No problem. Complex structures deriving from simple ones? Here you go. (For a really good discussion of this, see here.)

My point is that if you value science (and my troublesome friends do) then these conclusions come pretty much par for the course. The science we use to figure out the dynamic processes on Pluto or Saturn is the same science we use here to detect climate change. The science we use to figure out genetic based diseases and immune responses is the same science we use to determine the mechanisms of evolution. I'd say evolution is like the underlying physics used to understand the internals of stars except living systems are so much more complex.


In fact, the science is so settled on these two propositions that people who prefer not to see these conclusions (my friends among them) have to reject partial science. Or categorize it so narrowly as to constitute rejection. Or declare it a hoax. One friend of mine accepted that there was warming but decided it was not human derived.

For each of them I could go over a point by point  reason why the science is solid and the conclusions valid. But it makes no difference! In science the evidence is the arbiter of correctness. But here the evidence is not accepted as evidence but instead is considered a stew of hoax, hyperbole and lies.

Not to say there is no hoax, hyperbole and lies in science-- scientists are human and human beings make mistakes, try to spin the game and overstate their findings. That's one of the reasons non-peer reviewed papers are suspect. But-- and this is a huge but-- scientists have an investment in ferreting out wrongdoings by their colleagues and do so regularly.

When this happens is it considered good science? No. It's often considered an example of scientists acting badly as a class. As if a man of a particular demographic nature committing a crime is an example of his entire demographic rather than an individual. For "demographic" put any group you want. "Examples of" is one of the clearest biases we have.

The problem, I think, is a combination of bad reporting of science and a misunderstanding of what science actually is.

Science is the dirty, messy, difficult process of trying to figure out the universe on its own terms. It's hard. It lurches forward and back. It's mediated by deeply flawed beings called human who bring every sort of sorry misconception to the table. It's like democracy: a horribly deformed system of governance that happens to be better than any other system. For "governance" substitute "understanding."

Given that definition, it's not surprising it stumbles around.

That said, science reporting is much, much worse.

I have this bad habit of reading a science report in some popular outlet, finding out the authors of the study, and going on the net and finding the original study-- or at least its abstract. Then, I often read reviews of the same study to get see its flaws. As often as not, the science report is completely wrong in its reporting. (Check out BadScience for some good examples.)

Still, in the age of the internet, the ability to determine the scientific source (or non-source) for scientific claims is easily accessed. If one desires to do so and has the ability to figure out what claims are fiction and what claims are not.

My friends have the latter and not the former.

And herein lies the rub: if people of good faith and honest work cannot win over intelligent minds with evidence, what do we do? These people are not dimwitted or evil hearted. They are bright, sophisticated intellectuals who have replace the authority of evidence with something else.

I can present all the evidence in the world and it does no good.

It's discouraging.

Strange Films to Watch During the Presidential Apocalypse

I've been perusing the depths of Amazon Prime and Netflix to see what sort of odd little films they serve up.

One piece of advice: for good or ill, I have found absolutely no correlation between the rating of these films and what I think of the quality of the films. The only way I've found to see if they're any good is to watch them.

That said, fortunately a film will announce that it is a dog early on. But there were a couple that kept showing promise right until the credits and you knew: there goes two hours I will never get back.

These, however, were pretty fun.



Mars
Or, as stated on the poster, Looking for Life and Love on Mars.
This is Geoff Marlett's film. It's animated-- sort of. It's animated in the same sort of style as Linklater's A Scanner Darkly, that is, he filmed the actors against a green screen, cartoonified them, added background and then cartoonified the lot.

It's one of those tongue-in-cheek, ironically detached films that are quite popular these days, though this is the first time I've seen it in a science ficiton. It has Kinky Friedman as the US President.

Boy and girl go to Mars with a oddball billionaire, discover Martians and return in love. Boy is sent because he's the best looking astronaut. The actors have a tendency to notice at intervals that they're in a film but it's done in a gentle, mocking way and is not offensive. At no point do they act like the audience is an idiot. Instead, they expect the audience to be participating in the experience. "Look, folks, we're having a movie" sort of thing. I found it charming.

Here are a couple of youtube videos both showing and discussing the film. Here, here and here.

Frequently Asked Questions about Time Travel
This little gem is the product of the twisted minds of Gareth Carrivick and Jamie Mathieson. Think Shaun of the Dead meet Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself. Three friends get unstuck in time via a time hole in the loo of a pub. All sorts of misfoldings occur while they are "helped" by a bumbling low level time travel bureaucrat. Like Gerrold's book, they pretty much run through all of the different tropes and like Shaun, it's loads of fun.

Trailer here.

John Dies at the End
Don Coscarelli did this one. This one is less slapstick and more irony-- sort of like Mars but with Lovecraftian horror rather than space travel. Again, the fun is in the surprises. It's also the only film I've ever seen where an amputee is in the script as important and funny at the same time.

There's also a little time travel in it when David, the main character, gets a future call from his friend John right after he's found John's dead body. John-- on the phone-- isn't quite sure what time it is and asks in all innocence: "Am I dead yet?"

Trailer here. But it's funnier than the trailer would suggest.

Only Lovers Left Alive
It's not clear if Jim Jarmusch still has his indie creds. Not that he isn't a completely original filmmaker. He absolutely is. I've been a fan since Dead Man-- which I still maintain is one of Johnny Depp's more compelling performances. But if your work is being added to the National Film Registry and you can make a film with Tom Hiddleston, John Hurt and Tilda Swinton, aren't you by definition mainstream? Not that Jarmusch has sold out. He hasn't. His films are just as interesting (and sometimes incomprehensible) as they ever were. But it seems the audience has caught up with him.

Anyway, OLLA is a vampire film that dwells on the ennui of age-- not new territory for vampires in general. But in this case the vampires are obviously more alive and conscious beings than humans and the destruction of the world by humans is the source of the ennui.

It's a lovely film. I get the feeling that Jarmusch had gotten pretty disgusted with the vampire genre and decided to flip the tropes. He does an excellent job.

Trailer here.

Ink
I've left the most interesting to last.

Ink is about a father and child out of touch with one another. The premise is that the world of dreams is divided between storytellers and incubi. Storytellers give us the good dreams and incubi give us the nightmares. There are other post-dead creatures in between. One of them, Ink, kidnaps the soul of a little girl. The storytellers try to get it back.

As the story goes on the backstory gradually fills in the whys and wherefores and I will not tell them here. The blend is good.

The film was written, directed and musically composed by Jamin Winans. He has another film on Amazone: The Frame. I can't wait.

Trailer here.

Science Fiction and Nevada

Science Fiction and Fantasy is about world building more than about anything else. I mean this in the sense that once the author has made the decision to move the setting outside the realm of an accepted consensus of "normal", that world has to be described and presented.

This is also true of historical fiction or fiction that takes place outside of the audience's realm of experience. Describing the other takes a different prose representation than describing the same. But, for this post, I'm limiting the discussion to worlds that must be built. I.e., they don't exist in the normal frame of reference at all.

I'll dispose of it quickly: it's pretty much impossible.

What we end up doing, instead, is creating analogs of a built world and describe them in terms we would use to describe the world of our current understanding. For example, we can't describe a world based on mantis shrimp's perception of millions of color combinations or from the point of view of a cuttlefish's distributed perception. What we can do in that case is either create an analog-- a stand in for human perception-- or describe something that a human being would find as odd and lean on the oddness to present the world.

We don't just do it in fiction. We do it in the real world all the time. And then we borrow that ability to present a built world in fiction.

In our genre, the place is a character just like any other and must be as rigorously built and considered in the same way. And we do it by comparing it to our world. Unfortunately, we commonly do not use the amazing differences in geography and location available in our real for inspiration.

This was brought home to me in my recent Nevada trip.

For example, take this picture on the left.

This is a small tree we found in Valley of Fire. We ended up finding it all over Nevada. It's a gray shrub that has little life to show. It has green leaves at various parts of the plant but it largely looks dead.

Except, of course, that violent growth in the center of the picture with fruit. The branch structure is different. There are flowers. Fruiting bodies. It looks like an epiphyte parasite.

In point of fact that's exactly what we thought it was until we examined it more closely and realized the red branches were growing out of the dead looking gray branches. Was it a disease? A fungus that hijacked the plant?

Our conclusion was that it was the reproductive component of the plant. Normal leaves were produced for photosynthesis. But when conditions were right, the plant went nuts and produced the material you see. In some cases it really looked like the plant had been consumed.

Another example is shown at left. This is also in the Valley of Fire. In this case, the geology is truly bizarre.

Normally, we think of things getting mixed together. Basalt mixed with sandstone. However, here the red, yellow and gray sections of the area are combined and kept separate. The colors aren't as distinct as they should be but the demarcations are as sharp as if drawn.

Think of the mountains we see in Tolkein. Or in Kipling's Kim. We have a preconception of how they should look and the authors leave us to that. However, this photograph shows how different that preconception can be from reality.

This one comes from Utah.

Again, this is a different sort of mountain than is normally pictured in the common perception. Fossils are found neatly popping out of strata like that. The fact of finding bones or shells just in the dirt have an influence on people's thinking. We should capture that in our fiction.

Regional fiction often captures this sort of thing well. Southwest fiction, for example, presents the desert and water completely differently from fiction back east. And if you read many of the writers of the northwest, rain is a constant companion.

My point here is that the world building we do must necessarily reflect our own earth to some degree-- how could it not? It's our singular experience. That said, our own earth is wonderfully varied. So should be our fiction.

Fossils and Atomic Testing in Nevada

(Picture from here.)

I wrote this on the trip back and promptly fell quite sick. So it's going up now. 

Today is the last day of our vacation in Nevada. I’m writing this in the waiting area for our flight from Las Vegas back to Boston.

It’s been a good trip though probably not to everyone’s taste. We stayed in Mesquite rather than Las Vegas. Didn’t visit any of the casinos save for one fairly miserable experience where we had dinner there and had to cut our way through the smoke to the buffet. Not recommended.

We spent most of our time hiking around the area looking for neat rocks and fossils.

A few interesting facts about Nevada:

• 87% of the state is owned by the federal government and administered by the Bureau of Land Management, the agency that manages federal land that isn’t parks and other sorts of whatnot. (Note, BLM rules change from state to state so what is true in Nevada might not be true in Utah.)
• The BLM allows up to 250 pounds of rocks and fossils if they’re not to be sold
• The BLM restricts vertebrate fossils. (A permit is required.) Non-vertebrate fossils are just fine.
• Petrified wood is not considered a fossil.
• The BLM has very nice maps that show you the different land ownership types such as BLM land, private or park land.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the area was having the coldest winter in twenty years and the high country had significant snow—two to four inches in some places. Since we’re from New England, the bad news wasn’t all that bad.

Nevada is interesting geologically. Some of the uplifted rocks were laid down in the Cambrian so there are trilobite and other like fossils. Other areas were underwater during the time in the Jurassic so there are ichthyosaurs and the like. I didn’t research if there were dinosaur fossils in the state but I suspect there are. A lot of petrified wood.

It’s also interesting in that there is an abundance of volcanic events amidst the sedimentary rock. Often, you’ll be walking along a cut and see disintegrating mud underneath gravel underneath shale underneath basalt. A wash is the result of water flowing down the mountains and exiting down the valley. Often, you might find chalcedony, jasper, mud rock, and shale all mixed together. On one slope we found ammonites next to a pale, opalescent chalcedony. We brought home both.

We did do a few things that were not entirely rock collecting oriented. We did some hiking in Zion Park in Utah—highly recommended—and visited Hoover Dam. Also recommended.

We also visited the Atomic Testing Museum.

This was very cool.

I grew up in the fifties where we went to bed thinking wondering where we would hide if the nuclear bombs dropped. One of the movies shown in the museum had the “duck and cover” song, which made me a bit nervous.

There were a couple of things that this museum highlighted. One was that the people who were testing atomic weapons were absolutely sincere in thinking they were doing the right thing and protecting their country. To them this was not mere jingoistic patriotism. They considered the Soviet Union a very real and credible threat. The weapons stockpiles were important in maintaining peace between the nations. Whether this is, in fact, true or not is something that I’m not going to debate here.

A lot of times when you hear people talk about such things, there’s a sense that they’re trying to convince themselves. I got this feeling when I heard Robert McNamara talk about Viet Nam or Richard Cheney talk about Iraq. The people talking about what happened in the National Test Facility didn’t have a qualm about what they did at the time.

Part of this was they also now have a clear idea of the mistakes they made. Fallout yields were miscalculated. Energy release was underestimated. Bomb safety was not well characterized. None of this was due to incompetence. It was because this was all new. Much of the early testing took place in less than a decade since the nuclear explosions in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. No one really knew what was going to happen. Many of the interviewees acknowledged this and would have preferred waiting. It was just they didn’t feel they had the time. They have regrets that some things fell the way they did but have no regrets on their actions.

For example, in the sixties some incidents caused them to execute a safety review of the bombs themselves. It turns out that the way they were built, the bombs wanted to explode. They redesigned the bombs and warheads so they could be stored safely.

This is all up front in the museum. One gets the impression that the people who run the NTF feel they need hide nothing.

We live in an age where people hide acts executed in all good conscience lest they be subject to modern criticism. It’s refreshing to watch people saying, yeah: we would have told people to take shelter in the area for a couple of days after the bomb blast because we blew hell out of the ozone layer and it took three days or so for it to grow back. But we didn’t know. We would still have tested the bombs because we didn’t know squat about them back then. We would have just done it differently.

It was also a different perspective to see how people in Nevada viewed such things. I was living in California most of that time. We ducked and covered in the classrooms in case war came. But, in Las Vegas, people saw the flash. There were hundreds of tests in Nevada, many above ground. Every time an above ground test happened, it was seen across much of the state. In California, we were scared of something amorphous. In Nevada, they saw it every few months.

Then, back to the hills and looking for rocks and fossils.

We ended up with about 100 pounds of rock holding down every counter in the hotel room. Fifty pounds were our addition to the adjacent rock garden but the remaining 50 pounds needed to be shipped. We ended up purchasing a sturdy suitcase in Walmart and paying $25 for a check on. We heard, “what do you have in here? Rocks?” more than once. We just smiled and gave them our credit card.

So, now it’s back to work and writing and other stuff. I’ll get back to the Green Revolution before long. We haven’t even gotten to Darwin’s abominable mystery: flowering plants.

Biological Revolutions: The Green Invasion, Part 2

(Picture from here.)

It's hard to overestimate the importance of the plant invasion of the land. It's the precursor to everything else.

I don't just mean plants, either. The current model of vertebrates invading the land involves the changes in freshwater swamps being the source. What causes freshwater swamps? The plants surrounding the fresh water.

Let's imagine for a moment the world prior to the land invasion.

We have oxidation geology-- that started long before when the cyanobacteria pumped oxygen into the atmosphere. But there was no soil. No fixed nitrates. No decomposing strata. It was bare rock and gravel. Sure, there was slime at the edge of the estuary pools but not much else.

Even fresh water was different. One of the reasons freshwater lakes and swamps have life in them is the washed down organic material from the life on the land. Without washed down material there is nothing to eat. Nothing to feed the bottom of the web of life and without that bottom there's nothing to build anything above it.

The green invasion had to happen first. It was the enabling technology for everything else that came later. The land plants fix carbon out of the air into organic material. That organic material falls and decomposes-- how? It needs fungi and bacteria. Fungi are absolutely dependent other materials to consume. On the land that can't work without the plants, right? Fungi are very old-- they diverged about 1.5 billion years ago. But they couldn't invade the land until plants were there for them. Again: plants are the enabling technology.

Before the vertebrates, the most successful animals invading the land were what became the insects. Again, without plants there was nothing there for them.

Back to the swamp, the vertebrates came out to invade the land and become amphibians. I suspect the very first were there chasing the insects. But they wouldn't have been there at all unless the swamps were fertile first. Oh, yeah. That's due to the plants.

One of the very earliest innovations in plants that enabled this colonization was the development of the alternation of generations. This is analogous to the sperm and egg vs. organism in animals. Animals produce gametes-- eggs and sperm-- that are haploid, i.e., have 1/2 the total number of genes in the full organism. They come together to create a diploid individual with both sets of genes that then goes on to grow into another gamete producing adult. There are a lot of ways this occurs but this is the mechanism boiled down to the roots. (Heh.)

The embryophyta, are the equivalent in plants. There is a sporophyte,  which is diploid, and a gametophyte, which is haploid. Almost every plant you see, from liverworts to sequoias, are embryophytes.

There's been an enormous amount of discussion about haploidy vs diploidy. Why are diploids pretty much universally the norm in highly organized multicellular organisms? Diploid organisms have double the genetic material to work with and the sexual mechanisms are very efficient at presenting new combinations. Yet selection is far more efficient in acting on haploid organisms. Possibly the blending of these two approaches, diploid for organism and haploid for gametes, is the strength of the system.

The bryophytes were very early-- non-vascular plants. We talked about them last time.

Clearly, there were several early innovations but the first one that really enables increase of scale is vascularization-- the creation of a plant vascular system to move nutrients, oxygen and waste products around the plant system. The development of lignin was key for this and it gave structural rigidity to the plant cell walls and from that the structural strength of the xylem and phloem. This happened about 440-360 million years ago. This was a brand new innovation for plants and a significantly more recent than the similar system developed in animals.

It's interesting the plant vascular system and animal vascular system serve similar needs but evolved completely differently and under significantly different environments. In both cases, it enabled the organisms to scale up since it severed the requirement of being intimate with the organisms outside world.

All through the Devonian, these vascular plants proliferated. At some point, they developed an outside material to resist the loss of water. Thus we come to cellulose.

Land plants didn't invent cellulose. Algae did that and how it happened is a long and ongoing discussion. (See here.) But land plants had it in their repertoire. It was a component of their cell wall. (See here.) At some point, that cell wall thickened on the outside. The thick outer wall, likely selected for by the ability to preserve water, had an inadvertent advantage: it gave structural rigidity to the plant. Plants could grow tall.

Now, plants use a lot of mechanisms to support themselves. Trees use a dead rigid inner core (called "wood") they continually encapsulate. Bananas, for example, use a completely different mechanism. Cut a banana tree down and take it apart and you will find no wood. Just what looks like a tightly coiled leaf. In this case, the tree gets its rigidity by hydrostatic pressure-- the same thing that makes a garden hose stiff when the water is blocked.

The lignophytes, those plants that could generate wood, arose very pretty quickly. The first land plants showed up in the Ordovician, about 485-443 mya. Vascular plants showed up in the Silurian period: 443-419 mya. Wood shows up in the Devonian: 418-358 mya. The time from the first known land plants to woody plants that could become trees is about 67 million years. Approximately the time that it took from the meteor drawing the curtain on the Cretaceous to now.

Not bad. Not bad at all.