The Blog

Guest post by Marianne Brasil, a recent PhD graduate from UC Berkeley’s Department of Integrative Biology

The last moment of “normal” life that I can remember really clearly is a lovely evening spent with friends, taking a brief and much-needed pause from dissertation writing to belatedly celebrate my birthday. That was the evening of March 6th, 2020. Even as I enjoyed the company of friends that night, I was constantly thinking about the months ahead and managing worries about looming chapter draft deadlines. I had no idea what the next few months would bring. 

In early March, my plan was to file my dissertation at UC Berkeley by the mid-May deadline, and then to start as a postdoctoral researcher at the Berkeley Geochronology Center [http://www.bgc.org/]. I was frequently daydreaming about my plans to head to Spain as a visiting researcher for fieldwork in mid-June. As I write this in mid-July, I’m sitting in my home office trying to stay cool as a heatwave passes through in Austin, TX, where I’ll be working remotely as a postdoc for the foreseeable future. The events of the past few months feel like a blur, and I’m still reeling from the sharp change of course.

March was a strange month, but the really odd part was that it didn’t feel that strange at the time. In January and February, I’d spent the better part of every day sitting at my desk at home, writing, revising, and often holding my head in frustration, pushing my dissertation closer and closer to the May 15th finish (/dead)line. In early March, when the ‘Shelter in Place’ order in my county was implemented, the impact to my day-to-day life was actually relatively minimal. Other than missing a few weekly trips to campus and one or two weekly outings to a favorite restaurant as a break from writing, my daily experience was mostly the same as before COVID-19 really started to impact the Bay Area. 

Three exceptions to this sense of normalcy do, however, stand out as really memorable. First, remembering to grab a mask and hand sanitizer on the way out the door to walk my pup, and then having to bob and weave around neighbors to keep a six+ foot distance between us. Second, the stressful first experience of grocery shopping with my partner, who’s trained in sterile lab techniques and exceedingly careful about minimizing potential exposure (it’s clear that I’m the paleontologist in the family, more familiar with the hazards of dirt and superglue). This grocery shopping adventure resulted in us deciding that grocery deliveries were probably a less stressful option moving forward, although that was not without some humorous mishaps (e.g., a replacement of six pounds of our favorite snack, in-shell sunflower seeds, for six pounds of sunflower kernels – enough salad topping for the next six months, at least). And the third memorable exception to a sense of normalcy: calling my parents daily to reassure them, and repeatedly stressing the importance of their careful actions for their own health, and for the greater good of public health. 

Things started to feel less and less normal in April, when it became more and more clear that the impact of COVID-19 would be long-lasting and far-reaching. Around this time, it became apparent that my plans to travel to Spain would need to be significantly postponed. It was also around this time that my partner lifted our spirits by accepting a dream job for a small company based in Austin, TX. Sitting in our apartment just north of Berkeley, without a yard, unable to enjoy any of our surroundings in the Bay Area while paying university-subsidized but still excessive rent costs, we decided it made perfectly good sense to move to Austin where we’d at least be able to afford some outdoor space. But before we could make the move, I needed to clear the daunting hurdle of (finally!) finishing and submitting my dissertation. 

I have a tough time remembering April and early May, probably because I’ve subconsciously blocked the memory of back-to-back-to-back 12+ hour days stress-writing at my desk, with my pup providing moral support from under my chair. Focusing on writing and revising in the middle of a pandemic required silencing all notifications, banning myself from checking any news sources, and keeping a constant supply of coffee at hand (the latter of which I can thank my partner for). Somehow, by mid-May, after multiple rounds of revisions with my committee members, I had a finalized draft ready to submit. But, I still needed the approving signatures of my committee members. 

One of the most bizarre parts of filing a dissertation in the middle of a pandemic was collecting the three signatures that would finally seal six years of my life and grant me a PhD. I drove to my advisor’s house, where she had left my signature page on her front steps, bearing the signatures of two of my committee members, and had thoughtfully taped two congratulatory lollipops to the envelope (more on that below…). She came out to wave at me and congratulate me from her patio (a good ten feet away, of course) and we said our goodbyes, complete with air hugs. With two signatures in hand, I only needed one more. The following day, I coordinated with my third committee member to meet on a street corner near his house. We met on a walking path, under the train tracks, and I set down a clipboard with my signature page on a bench and backed away several feet to maintain a safe distance between us. After a brief and socially distant exchange, I thanked him, we wished each other the best, I picked up the clipboard, and we parted ways. I got back into my car, took off my mask, sanitized my hands, and immediately scanned my completed signature page with my phone (lest anything unexpected happen on my six-minute drive home).

The months between filing my dissertation on May 23rd and today somehow simultaneously feel like days and years. After the anti-climactic feeling of filing my dissertation without the anticipated graduation and celebration with loved ones, my partner and I packed our life into a 16-foot-long shipping container and said our socially-distant goodbyes to friends and family in the Bay Area. Leaving our home state, and our home in Berkeley of ten years, without being able to give our closest friends and family a hug brought out the bitter in the bitter-sweetness of this new beginning. With mixed feelings, we loaded up our car at the end of May and started the 29-hour drive from Berkeley to Austin, stopping only to give our puppy (and ourselves) bathroom breaks, fill up our gas tank, and make quick stops to see our families. Stopping on the side of CA Interstate 5 to see my parents in a Taco Bell parking lot, and again further south to see my partner’s family in a Red Lobster parking lot was surreal, to say the least, but was the closest thing to closure we got as we left California. 

Fast-forward past the weeks of getting moved in and settled in our new home in Austin, TX, and today I’m spending my days mostly reading for new projects and writing up old ones, interspersed with Zoom meetings and short breaks to chase my pup around the yard. A couple of weeks ago, Berkeley Graduate Division [https://grad.berkeley.edu/] mailed me my “Phinally Finished” lollipop, keeping the decades-old tradition alive and providing a little bit of comfort in something that feels just a tiny bit normal, but also feeling like a relic of a time long ago. I have no idea what the remaining two years of my postdoc will look like in the midst of COVID-19, but for now I’m choosing to reflect on the few silver linings that have come with the experience of the last few months. I’ve built in ways to keep in touch with family and friends in ways that I likely wouldn’t have, had it not been for the months of isolation. In the absence of social outings and trips to favorite restaurants, I’ve tried new recipes, taken up embroidery, planted a garden, and learned how to make my mom’s bread – the smell and warmth of it bringing a little piece of familiar comfort to my new home. And lastly, I’ve been able to stay connected to my intellectual family back in Berkeley. Even though over a thousand miles now lie between us, I’m able to forget about that distance when I see everyone together on Zoom. Even though the next few years are fogged with uncertainty, every day I’m comforted by the steadiness and support of my intellectual family, and my motivation rekindled to keep doing science and to keep making our scientific spaces better places for anyone who wants to join us. 

Guest post by Mollie Tessler, 4th year undergraduate at UC Berkeley majoring in Integrative Biology

The west and east coast have many differences. There are good and bad to both, and outsiders are easily identifiable on either. One main difference is natural disasters. On the west coast, earthquakes and wildfires strike without warning. This suddenness may account for west coasters stereotypical “go with the flow” and laid back attitude. On the east coast, the more “high strung” coast as some would argue, natural disasters come with warning. They allow you to plan ahead and continue the fast walking way of life. 

The newness of California and its natural disasters presented itself during my sophomore year when California was devastated by wildfires. This forced Universities to shut their doors early for Thanksgiving break, the big game was cancelled, and students retreated en masse to their homes throughout the state. As I frantically searched for flights to my blizzard stricken state, I felt far. But little did I, or the university know, that these pesky three day shutdowns for fires would only be the tip of the iceberg in this concept of online education.

As a junior, I began learning of COVID-19 within my infectious diseases course in January 2020. I would bring fun snippets and facts back to my house, share with my friends the latest case numbers, and told them nonchalantly on Feb 24^th that the disease was on the verge of pandemic potential. As the week progressed and the first case of COVID-19 was identified in Berkeley, the severity of this unseeable enemy became more and more evident. The novelty of the disease that I was introduced to on slide three during the first day of class was quickly outweighed by the danger becoming more real. Infectious diseases are interesting to learn about, but not when the answers aren’t known. 

And as if a switch had been flipped, the spring semester plans that had been perfectly laid out were gone. Seniors left in waves, hugging their friend’s goodbye, but assuring each other they’d return together in April. Similarly to the wildfires, students worldwide returned home in a mass exodus. But not me. I stayed. Which is ironic given that since I first came to California, I knew that it was temporary. As I was planning to stay for four years, and then return back east for graduate school or employment. When able to, I’ll go home for large breaks. But for safety reasons, a pandemic forced me to stay in my temporary home. 

I went from living with 65 women to living with 3 men. My meals used to consist of a table of 12, with chairs being ever added and squeezed. My meals were now at a table of four. I spent my free time knitting what would be known as my “quarantine blanket” where this time would have otherwise been spent with friends. The blanket’s progress, as shared weekly with my lab, quickly became a way to tell the passage of time. My 25 minute walk to CNR five times a week was replaced with what could barely qualify as a hop, skip and a jump to my makeshift desk I built in a closet; a closet that I was voluntarily spending my days studying in, might I add. Like many others, my backpack remained untouched for months. This reminder of a time that seems foreign looking back. 

As the semester progressed, more and more classes abandoned zoom live lectures and its faults and replaced them with pre-recorded lectures. Clubs that previously met weekly, now met every so often, not having much to discuss. Assignments were being shifted around, and some professors dropped off the map completely. Students’ structure was slowly being stripped from them. The only consistency that I held onto was my weekly lab meetings and book seminar. These 2 hours of meeting a week were some of the only times I would be in an intellectual setting that didn’t consist of being lectured at. It was refreshing to have conversations with live humans as opposed to learning a new material topic alone. This time was not only intellectually rich, but socially as well. 

Because of my knowledge that my time in California was temporary I was reluctant to make deep connections, because I knew I would have to leave them in four years. Well, I guess all it took was a pandemic to make me realize, inadvertently or not, I had made deep connections out west. Relationships I knew existed but was too stubborn to see the power of prior became ever more clear in their importance. I finally had people who asked how my day was, people I could laugh over a documentary’s bad editing with, and people to watch as my blanket progressed. I learned of the term lab family and embraced it. As new graduates post-college plans were crumpling before their eyes, the class of 2021 and beyond started to think of their own employment troubles in a COVID world. Juniors began noticing the limited time they had left in college, and the limited time they had left with those they’ve met along the way. These juniors, similarly to the seniors of 2020, didn’t know if they’d be able to hug their friends goodbye. 

As I progress onto my senior year, I’ll remember last semester as the one where my finals were not taken in a hot classroom with slanted desks but in a closet, with my back up against the dresser talking to myself throughout the test. As I progress into my senior year with the plans for fall becoming clearer, I like many others are coming to terms with having waved goodbye to our normal college days without even knowing. Grand plans, ideas, trips and memories that will never be formed but will remain as an ideal. There will be sports games that will be cancelled due to a pandemic instead of wildfires, and a lot of online schooling. As I look towards this new school year, I don’t know what it will bring. But a few things are certain, I have found my place and my family out west and for that I am grateful.

Guest post by Rachel Pekelney, 3rd year undergraduate at UC Berkeley majoring in Conservation and Resource Studies

I’m not alone in missing certain things from our pre-Covid world. I’ve been doing my best to avoid unnecessary thought about the future given its hazy shroud of uncertainty, but as a third year undergraduate, I can’t help but imagine what may happen if the fall semester is entirely or mostly online. 

Like many other students, I unceremoniously returned home to live with my parents at the beginning of the shelter-in-place orders. Although I have missed many parts of on-campus classes and physically being in Berkeley, I’ve specifically missed the feeling of being surrounded by collective learning and an intellectual community. It’s a feeling I don’t think I dwelled on much before being away from it, but during this past semester’s RRR week— a time when my friends and I would normally ensconce ourselves in a corner of Doe Library—I sat alone in my room at home noticing its conspicuous absence. 

Studying in Berkeley’s beautiful and abundant libraries impressed upon me a sense of collaborative, accumulated knowledge. In a subtle way, being literally surrounded by books made me feel like I was a part of an intellectual community, even if I wasn’t always with other people. I liked to sit at a table in the Bioscience and Natural Resources Library and glance over the titles around me; on one side would be an entire shelf devoted to information on whales, and on another side, funnily enough, infectious diseases. If something caught my eye, I would just pluck a book off the shelf and browse through cool diagrams or passages I didn’t fully understand. 

More tangibly, I felt connected to Berkeley’s intellectual community whenever I attended in-person office hours. This spring semester’s Zoom office hours had an awkwardness to them despite the fact that we had the first half of the semester to connect with our instructors in person. Now that I’m starting a new online summer course with an unfamiliar professor, I feel more anonymous than I did in my spring Zoom classes. And while I can still attend online office hours, they don’t feel the same when I can’t appreciate the unique personalities of my professors’ campus offices. As leaders in their respective fields, Berkeley professors are bountiful, welcoming resources for information. Since I entered college unsure of what major I wanted to pursue, I made an effort in freshman year to go to office hours at least once for each of my professors and ask a few questions to see if anything sparked my interest. I was never disappointed. In my wildland fire science professor’s office, slices of trees with fire scars and ring measurements adorned the walls. The professor for my natural disasters class once pulled from his desk drawer samples of continental and oceanic crust rocks so I could feel the difference in density between the two. Works by Saidiya Hartman, Angela Davis, and James Baldwin filled crammed shelves in the office of the professor for my “Novels of Toni Morrison” class. For my two semesters of calculus, I diligently attended office hours at the Student Learning Center with clusters of other students. Though I can’t say I’m nostalgic for the problem sets themselves, I do miss the feeling of collectively working through them with my peers around me. 

I was (and am) still learning new things with online classes. While I am fortunate to have a comfortable and safe home to go back to, college feels quite different when I’m sitting alone at my desk surrounded by my old Harry Potter books and high school yearbooks. Less like a shared journey, more like a solitary grind. 

However, I haven’t completely lost that feeling of being in the intellectual community of Berkeley. One of the reasons I now reflect on the absence of in-person office hours is because that is how I first became involved in the Hlusko Lab as an undergraduate research assistant. I took Professor Hlusko’s Human Biological Variation class in the fall of my freshman year, and began popping into her office hours regularly to ask questions. Being around Professor Hlusko and her group of graduate and undergraduate students has provided me with a welcoming and invaluable window into both the research and teaching sides of Berkeley. I had the opportunity to join the lab group for a seminar this spring, and once the shelter-in-place orders began, an additional weekly “Lab Tea” Zoom check-in. I feel connected to this academic community, which has been especially meaningful to me in this time of physical distance from Berkeley itself. I couldn’t have anticipated any of this at the beginning of the school year, but I’m grateful that I have it now. And all of it was made possible because I simply liked going to office hours and having a face-to-face conversation with my professor. 

Though Zoom office hours feel uninviting, I know we as students will adapt and make them work. I still attend them, and whether instructors use artificial Zoom backgrounds or reveal the walls of their homes, there exists a novel form of connection in our shared separateness. We are simultaneously far apart and brought closer than before through our new virtual windows into each others’ worlds. But for now, I am grateful for the time I spent physically surrounded by Berkeley’s intellectual community, in the libraries and in office hours, and I look forward to the time when I can do so again. 

Over the last 7 months I have been asked to bring a scientific perspective to several art projects that incorporate themes from human evolution.

One was Paul Sussman‘s one-man-show “The Wrong Kind of Pessimism” at the Marsh Theater in San Francisco last April.

Just this past week, it was Elisabeth Daynes‘ art exhibit “Find Yourself” at 836m Gallery in conjunction with The Leakey Foundation.

I also moderated a panel discussion at the Lawrence Hall of Science after the premiere of the full-length documentary film The Bearded Lady Project (a film that explores women’s experiences in the field-based geological and paleontological sciences, an art-meets-the-culture-of-science production).

These events have gotten me thinking about the interface of art and science. Here is my previous post on The Bearded Lady Project. Below, I share more of my reflections.

The Past

Science has revealed that all of the genetic variation observed across people living today is equivalent to the amount of genetic variation observed in one subspecies of chimpanzee. There may be ~8 billion of us, but we are all very, very genetically similar.

The genomics revolution has also shown that this genetic variation may best be characterized as reflecting ~20 or so past populations. That said, 98% of us have 6 of these populations represented in our genomes. The old classification system that divided humanity into five major, distinct races is, well, it is completely wrong.

Science has also provided ample evidence of human biological adaptation. Our bodies have been dramatically shaped by the surrounding environment, time and time again. From our skin color to our blood types to the shape of our bones, teeth, and hair.

Where our biological adaptations cannot accommodate, our cultural adaptations have evolved to meet the task.

We have found evidence of past cultures very different from the ones we see today. Our behavioral plasticity, the creativity of culture, has been key to our species’ ability to inhabit all seven continents on Earth. This variation demonstrates that what we see in our culture today is not how we have always been nor how human societies have to be.

As an example of this, let’s go back 30,000 years ago to the Gravettians, the people who lived in Europe just before the last ice age. These are the people who painted the awe-inspiring scenes inside caves such as Lascaux in France and Altimira in Spain. They also carved voluptuous women into stone. Some archaeologists interpret these cultural remains as evidence of a matriarchal society that thrived for ~10,000 years. The Gravettians represent a culture so very different from the highly patriarchal Yamnaya who ultimately “gentrified” (as Paul Sussman might say) a large region of Eurasia, pushing out the previous cultural group.

Let’s go back even further in time. Tens of millions of years of evolution have selected for primates, for apes, for hominids, for humans who are social, who work together, who use the power of the group to overcome the difficulties of survival, of raising children, of providing for the future, the future of tomorrow, next year, and increasingly, beyond.

The message from all of this science is so beautifully encapsulated in how Elisabeth Daynes explains the message of her art, “We are not the apex nor are we the only possible humanity.”

The Present

Science has also taught us that not all people think empirically. A data-driven view of the world is not universal. While many evolutionary biologists find comfort and, perhaps, awe in this larger, intertwined view of life on Earth. Many, if not most people find science unappetizing. Maybe this is because they didn’t like their high school science teacher. Maybe it is because science can come across as cold and calculated. Or maybe, they don’t like evolutionary biology because so many people see evolution as a dog-eats-dog perspective that is devoid of compassion. But as we just saw, this is not what the scientific evidence of our past actually shows.

The science of human evolution reveals useful and positive insight for humanity’s future. But in a culture where science is held at arms’ length and viewed with distaste, how do we share the benefits of the science with our larger community?

Art. Science needs art.

People are open to new ideas and new ways to view the world when they are provided the opportunity to do so through imagination, to explore these ideas in the realm of make-believe.

From my perspective as an evolutionary biologist, this is where the power of scientifically-aware art lies.

Art can convey a scientific message without the burden of data. There are no scientific terms, no analytical methods, no equations, no citations, no author lists or funding agencies or footnotes to distract from the message. Art can communicate the message, pure and simple, complex and provocative.

The Future

We stand at a crossroads for our society, for our species. At the most basic level, the Earth doesn’t care if humans are around in 10,000 years. It doesn’t matter to the universe if we do nothing about climate change or epidemics or threats from technology. The insects who survive this current mass extinction we have caused won’t care or mourn the loss.

But we, collectively, as a species should care. I think most people would like to think that we will still be here in 10,000 years. Or rather, we want our descendants to be here. We want people to talk about us much as we are thinking about the Gravettians and the Yamnaya, populations that many of us carry around parts of in our genomes, past people who made us who we are. We want to think that we too are laying the foundation for the future, for more people to live, to love, to do science, and to make art.

Elisabeth Dayne’s exhibit asks us to consider where we came from as we consider where we are going. Paul Sussman’s one-man-show asks the same. And this, this is exactly what evolutionary biologists are asking.

It is wonderful and inspiring to see how elegantly art can carry this message beyond the walls of the laboratory, and hopefully, positively influence how people see the world around them and the role they play in shaping its future.

Leslea Hlusko, University of California, Berkeley

As biologists explore the variation across the genomes of living people, they’ve found evidence of evolution at work. Particular variants of genes increase or decrease in populations through time. Sometimes this happens by chance. Other times these changes in frequency result from the gene’s helping or hindering individuals’ survival, a phenomenon known as selection. If a gene conferred a survival advantage, people with the mutation would have more offspring and the mutation would become more common in subsequent generations.

Most of those past episodes of selection make sense, as they worked on genes involved with things like resisting disease, blood oxygen levels at high altitudes, and having paler skin at northern latitudes.

However, researchers have also identified an episode of strong selection that doesn’t have such an obvious logic. It’s a mutation on a gene involved with the development of a suite of traits that don’t seem very similar at first glance: hair, teeth, sweat glands and breasts. This one was a mystery — what could have been the adaptive value of this mutation that led to it being common in northeastern Asia but nowhere else?

My research usually focuses on teeth, specifically genetic influences on their development. I came to this particular evolution puzzle when my colleagues and I gathered in Boston at the AAAS meeting last year to discuss the latest evidence of how people first migrated into the Western Hemisphere. We put together the clues about this episode of selection on human genetic variation – and found an example of adaptation to life at high latitude during the last ice age.

Natural selection … of what?

We were trying to understand selection for a mutation in the gene called EDAR – it encodes the ectodysplasin A receptor that plays a role in how tightly cells adhere to each other during the development of hair, teeth, sweat glands and breasts. All of these anatomical structures form via a very similar developmental process that happens while you’re still in your mother’s womb. Slight changes to the developmental mechanism results in the final differences between hair and teeth and sweat and mammary glands. But there is a fundamental similarity that, among other things, includes the activity of EDAR.

This shared development is especially obvious when things go wrong. For example, 1 in 10,000 newborns have a disorder called ectodermal dysplasia, which causes disruption to the development of their hair, teeth, skin, sweat glands and breasts.

The V370A mutation that we focused on, the one that experienced strong selection, doesn’t disrupt development of these structures; rather, it augments them. People with V370A have thicker and straighter hair shafts, and their incisors have extra buttressing on the tongue side – a feature biologists call “shoveling.”

So why did this mutation provide such an advantage to people who carried it? Mice that have been experimentally induced to have the V370A mutation have thicker fur shafts and increased density of sweat glands. A previous study of modern human genomic variation interpreted the selection to have occurred in northern China during the last ice age and focused on the sweat glands. The researchers suggested that the selection was for improved sweating that could help with regulating body temperature. But to my colleagues and me, that just didn’t feel like a convincing adaptive scenario given that this took place during the (cold) ice age.

Instead of the sweat glands, our attention was drawn to another trait. Mice with the V370A mutation also have an increase in the branching of their mammary ducts – the tiny tubes that intertwine with breast tissue and extract nutrients to make milk. Maybe it was this change in the breast tissue that was so valuable to people with this mutation?

Rather than trying to sample DNA from thousands of ancient people’s remains to see if they carried the mutation, we took advantage of the effect V370A has on human incisors. Relying on data collected over many years by my colleague G. Richard Scott from the University of Nevada, Reno, our group looked at the dental variation of over 5,000 skeletons from archaeological sites in Europe, Asia and the Americas to get a sense of how this mutation varied through time.

We found that all of the indigenous people living in the Western Hemisphere prior to European colonization had shovel-shaped incisors, which means they all likely had the V370A mutation. In contrast, only about 40 percent of the people in Asia had shovel-shaped incisors, and essentially no one in Europe did.

This pattern suggests that a population ancestral to Native Americans experienced the strong selection for V370A, an interpretation that differed from what my colleagues found when they only looked at genomic variation in living people. Using these ancient teeth, we were able to figure out when and where the selection happened. The next question we needed to address was why this selection occurred. What was going on to make this mutation so helpful and thus so much more prevalent?

An ice age advantage

Previous genetic work found that Native Americans descend from a common ancestral population that lived in Beringia, the region that links Siberia and Alaska. During the dramatic climate change associated with the last ice age 28,000 to 18,000 years ago, plants and animals that had previously lived in Siberia took refuge in a circumscribed area called the Beringian Refugium. For about 5,000 years, they were genetically isolated from other populations because of a vast dry tundra to the west and a lot of ice to the east. The people who found haven there too are referred to as the Beringian Standstill population.

It’s not easy to live that far north. Sure, it’s cold. But more importantly, at high latitudes the sun is lower in the sky so sunlight must travel through more atmosphere to reach Earth’s surface. This journey through the atmosphere mostly filters out the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation. Most life forms need sun exposure to be healthy, in large part because UV exposure induces the body to make vitamin D.

Lighter skin tones let in more UV and have been selected for multiple times in human history. But once you get to the Arctic, skin depigmentation alone won’t suffice. In order to live with so little UV, people have culturally innovated, eating diets rich in vitamin D, such as oily fish. But nursing infants don’t eat these foods. Babies get their nutrients through their mother’s milk.

This is where our EDAR gene comes back into the picture. The V370A mutation in mice increases the branching density of the mammary ducts, and very likely does the same exact thing in human breasts. Scientists know that vitamin D deficient conditions induce more ductal branching during the breast development that happens with pregnancy. All of the evidence suggests that the increased ductal branching associated with V370A helped transfer nutrients from mother to infant through breast milk in a population that was extremely vitamin D deficient.

So the selection wasn’t for thicker hair or shovel-shaped incisors – instead, it was much more likely to have been on mammary ducts. The thicker hair and tooth variation just went along for the ride because they are created by the same basic developmental pathway. Selection on genetic variation in EDAR is probably related to health consequences for nursing infants rather than its effects on hair, teeth or sweat glands.

Still traceable genetic inheritance

Once the Earth started warming up at the end of the last ice age, those ice sheets started to melt, sea level rose and global climate became more humid. The people living in Beringia needed to move again. Some went east, populating the Western Hemisphere rapidly and extensively. Some went west, merging back into populations that were living in northern and eastern Asia. Scientists see traces of this migration today. The occurrence of incisor shoveling decreases as you move away from the Arctic, there is evidence of a long-lost language, and some of those Beringian Standstill mitochondrial DNA mutations can be found in Asian populations.

Today, everyone with shovel-shaped incisors carries a little remnant of this ephemeral population with them and a reminder of the importance of the maternal-infant bond to human survival.

But they also have the other effects of the V370A mutation. The increase in mammary ductal branching seems likely to influence the transfer of nutrients from breast tissue into milk. It may also play a role in susceptibility to breast cancer, given that breast density differs between Asian and non-Asian women as does the occurrence of breast cancer, a relationship that matches the distribution of V370A around the world today.

These ideas present exciting hypotheses to test in future studies. For now, our research shows that the bones of our ancestors can provide evidence of human adaptation, evidence that shifts our understanding of how genes work.

Leslea Hlusko, Associate Professor of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Yesterday was Cal Day here at the University of California Berkeley. It’s a campus-wide open house, which is always a fun way to engage with the local community. As part of this, I served as a panelist for the Expand Her Potential in Science event hosted by the amazing CaT Bobino (who is as cool as the cover pic on her website suggests).

During the Q&A, an 8th grade girl named Destiny asked if the hurdles faced earlier in life are ever advantageous later for being a scientist.

I love this question.

It hadn’t really dawned on me before, but as soon as she asked it, I could hear in my head the voices of numerous co-authors over the years who have uttered amazement at my perseverance, not giving up when reviewers are particularly tough, but revising, resubmitting, pushing the project forward. Sometimes I fear it is more foolishness on my part than admirable perseverance, but whatever.

So, I told Destiny that I think all of the hard-knocks life can throw at you, especially girls and even more especially for people of color, those help you to build a really strong resilience muscle. And THAT will definitely help you be a good scientist. You don’t go into science to feel the love, as science by definition is a critical process. The stronger your resiliency, the better you will be at pushing forward, taking in the constructive criticism (and other types of criticism as well), re-working your proposal or project or paper or class lecture and constantly getting better.

Science, especially when you have two X chromosomes and/or a decent amount of melanin, can feel like death by 1,000 paper cuts. No one of the paper cuts is ever, I suppose, all that big of a deal, as the metaphorical colleague down the hall always says that I’m being too sensitive. So, I just shake my head, swallow hard, and move on. Resiliency gets me through 99 of them. But, I do find that I always crumple at the 100th. I have learned to let myself go home, lick my psychic wounds, watch Netflix, and eat a bunch of red vines.

But when you have a strong resiliency muscle, you are able to get back up after a few hours, or a few days, or a few weeks, or sometimes maybe it even takes a few months or years, but resiliency picks you up and you persevere.

And then today, in The New York Times, there was this article, “Why Men Quit and Women Don’t”

https://nyti.ms/2K2vcuL

Turns out that women drop out of marathons at a slightly lower rate than do men, especially when the weather conditions are particularly tough.

This is not at all surprising. And maybe we don’t want to read too much into these data. But, it’s thought-provoking.

Maybe it’s my rich adipose tissue (thanks to all those twizzlers and my two X chromosomes), or my willingness to commiserate with friends, or that I survived childbirth that I have persevered all these years in academia. But I doubt it.

Thanks to Destiny’s great question, I am pretty sure that I got invited to be a women-in-STEM panelist mostly thanks to this ultradistance resiliency run we call “female science professor”.

“nolite te bastardes carborundorum”

When I was an undergraduate I did a brief internship at the Field Museum in Chicago. While being shown through the research collections, I noticed a young woman hunched over a lab table preparing a skeleton while listening to music on her walkman (remember those?). That job looked unbelievably appealing to me.

And now that is a big part of what I get paid to do. Museum work is fantastic. I love being alone for hours on end with just my thoughts and a bunch of fossils, day after day. It is a wonderful mental space to be in. I am trying to remember how many months of my life I’ve spent working alone in museums in eastern Africa. At least a year, all added up, probably more.

Museum research also has its really lonely moments though. The hardest part for me is dinner when I stay in a hotel (we never stay in fancy hotels, so adjust your mental image to something a little less fancy than an old Motel 6). Going into the dining room with lots of wait staff, especially when the room is otherwise empty of guests, ordering, waiting an hour for the food to arrive, eating not great food, the same thing, over and over, night after night. By yourself. Dinner can be mentally exhausting when you are working for several weeks on your own in a museum.

Because of the intensity of solo museum research, I either find myself actively trying to stay focused and in that mental space, avoiding other people to a certain degree (i.e., acting like a socially awkward academic). Or, I sometimes end up in a really intense, heart-to-heart conversation with another researcher who is similarly there doing the same basic thing that I am.

This is how I first really connected with Ellen Currano, in the museum in Addis Ababa when we were both there doing lab work. We talked shared, commiserated, and then parted ways.

I think it was around that same time that Ellen Currano shared with a good friend of hers (who is not an academic) some professional insecurity.  Her friend, Lexi Marsh the filmaker, was shocked to hear this as she’d always seen Ellen as the epitome of strong and  confident, flying off to Ethiopia to find fossils in the field. Ellen made some passing joke about, well, maybe if she had a beard things would be different.

And thus, The Bearded Lady Project was born.

As part of this, maybe two years ago the documentary and photography team came through Berkeley to photograph female paleontologists. While I happily agreed to participate, I never could quite get my head around why there should be anything symbolic about putting on a beard.

I totally get the issue though, and deeply.

My male colleagues are definitely seen as *real* field scientists, and women, well, lay people and professional acquaintances alike both look at me with a smidge of disbelief and disappointment when they learn that I do fieldwork in eastern Africa. I don’t look like Indiana Jones and, I think, that squelches the romanticism of the science. It is like they fear that the fieldwork isn’t as hard if a woman can do it. So they reason it away. The places where I work must be the easy places to get to, so it isn’t really fieldwork and doesn’t count. Whatever the reason, I have been in quite a lot of situations where even my male professional colleagues can’t see me as a field paleontologist.

(For example, I was at a dinner with a quite famous paleontologist from another university fairly recently. At the table sat four paleontologists (three men and me), three of whom do a significant amount of field work (two men and me). The guest made some comment about the three of them being real paleontologists. It would be easy to say that I was just being overly sensitive, but honestly, this kind of thing happens at least a few times a month. It can get to you if you let it, this being invisible thing.)

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found the mental space in which the internal rewards are enough. It stings when I am professionally ignored and dismissed, but I am increasingly able to let it roll off. I do the fieldwork because it is challenging, exciting, unpredictable, and makes me feel so very alive.

There is nothing more soul soothing than sitting at the top of an outcrop at the end of a hard day, sweaty and dirty, surrounded in the soft evening breeze as the sun eases off its intensity. The wind in your face, cool against your sweaty, matted hair now free from your hat. Gulping warm water from the vehicle, thirsty from the long hike back.

You successfully recovered beautiful fossils that were completely unknown to science just that morning. There is a deep sense of pride to working with a team that you were essential in building, paying for the project with funds that you wrote the grant proposals to get, driving the field vehicle yourself, sometimes to outcrops that you yourself noticed in the satellite imagery and lead everyone to. There is something so meaningful when you can connect on a very human level with people from very different cultures to get a job done, to find new fossils of animals that lived millions of years ago. And then, to get everyone back to the vehicles safely, back to camp in one piece, and home from the field season healthy. The relief, the pride, the sense of accomplishment are very real.

I will die. My research interpretations will become outdated. But those fossils, they will be around for a very long time. Each fossil recovered by a field project I co-directed is a long-term contribution to the science that will long outlive all of us. Even if no one else thinks my fieldwork is *real*, those fossils are why I am proud of all of my efforts.

And those fleeting moments at the top of the outcrop, the dust, the challenge, the thrill of discovery, the connection to the people working in the field with me, that’s why I always yearn to go back.

The real genius of The Bearded Lady Project, to me at least, is that it brought out this sisterhood within my profession that I’d never really appreciated before. I am often the only woman in the field, or one of just two, maybe three. Always a very significant minority. In those situations I have learned to play down my gender, attempt to be as androgynous as possible. I am definitely not one of the guys, and I quickly learned the different set of rules by which I need to play. Now that I think about it, I guess that in many ways it is a little lonely in the field too, even though there are a lot of people around the dinner table.

For me, the deeper meaning of The Bearded Lady Project is that it was fun. I let my hair down and laughed and wore my pink reading glasses because I could. For a brief moment, the femininity of being a paleontologist was something to celebrate rather than hide. Dusty boots and all.

Ellen, Lexi, Kelsey — thank you so much. I look forward to co-hosting with Cindy Looy TBLP here in Berkeley in 2019!

It was another interesting day on NPR Morning Edition for human evolutionary biology. Here’s the story:

Here’s the key thesis of the story: “It’s almost like in the U.S. we’ve lost the breast-feeding instinct. That Western society has somehow messed it up. [Professor Brooke] Scelza wanted to figure out why: What are we doing wrong?”

The reporter’s evidence that Western women have “lost the instinct” is through comparison with dogs (who apparently have no problem whatsoever with nursing). The scientist on whose research this story is based, Prof. Scelza posed the same hypothesis through comparison with “the best breastfeeders in the world”, the Himba in Namibia, who don’t use bottles or formula. Because all Himba mothers nurse their babies, the hypothesis is that they don’t find it challenging to teach the baby to latch on properly or suffer from sore nipples or infections (mastitis) or other such complications that Western women experience. What is the reason they don’t have such complications? Nursing comes so easily to them because their culture doesn’t stigmatize it.

Prof. Scelza is suprised to find that in actuality, Himba women do find it hard to breastfeed and that they need support from more experienced women in their society to help them figure it out. Dr. Scleza’s conclusion is that grandmothers are essential for teaching new moms how to nurse, an extension of Professor Kristen Hawkes’ grandmothering hypothesis.

This story was on national news. It was listened to by likely millions of people. This was a significant opportunity to show the strength of anthropology, and yet, it fails on four levels as I see it. Let me share these with you, and then propose an alternative frame that would have been so much better IMHO.

First, the biological research is so lacking that I am embarrassed. I get that scientists need to be a little bit streamlined in how we present scientific research to a general audience, but geez, from my 5 minute search on PubMed, there is a huge amount of scientific evidence that all mammals have trouble nursing. There are numerous papers on mastitis and other breestfeeding complications in cows, dogs, cats, camels, and marsupials  (just to list a few). There is even a whole literature on pain management for lactating cats and dogs. Based on my quick dive into the literature, the supposition that breastfeeding is super easy for dogs is not supported by the evidence. The lesson here is that personal experience shouldn’t suffice for scientific research. Scientists and science journalists should consult the scientific literature before asserting that animals don’t have any breastfeeding complications.

At this point in the news report, every single veterinarian or person who has had pet with one of these complications just decided this story is scientifically unsound.

Second, the transition from dogs-as-ideal-breastfeeders to the Himba as “the best breast feeders in the world” comes across as somewhat offensive to my ears. We have already ascertained that the claims for dog breastfeeding are facile. Extending this perception to a group of people is similarly naive, and almost sounds like the journalist and the researcher first assumed that Himba women are more like dogs than Western women because they make breastfeeding look easy to the people who don’t know them well. This makes me cringe.

Anyone who caught that these women are from a country in the south west part of Africa just cringed with me at the apparent equivalency of Himba women to dogs, and both of them being distinct from women living in wealthy western countries. 

The third reason this story bothers me is that nowhere in the story did anyone make the point that the Himba are poor and therefore cannot afford bottles or infant formula even if they wanted or desperately needed them. The whole story comes across as though 100% of these women nurse because they prefer it to other options. These people live in traditional grass/mud huts and practice pastoralism and some subsistence farming. They face very real human rights issues. Does anyone really think that if these women had a choice, that the women who really struggled with latching or mastitis wouldn’t have taken the infant formula option if that existed for them? Glorifying the only option that poverty provides is, at least to me, rather offensive. If these women didn’t tough it out, their babies just wouldn’t survive. There is no other option. And for the women who ultimately can’t make it work, well, they lose the child.

Anyone sensitive to global health issues just deemed the story naive and tuned out.

The last reason this story bothers me as an example of human evolutionary biology is that it evokes grandmothers as the essential element to successful nursing. In reality, Prof. Scelza demonstrated that the essential element is culture, the transfer of knowledge from an experienced person to a novice. There isn’t anything magical about grandmothers other than that they might be the most proximate person to you. But it could be a lot of other people who transfer knowledge about breastfeeding. As Professor Alma Gottleib notes from her research that is quoted in the text version of the NPR story, “During the first few weeks, a newly delivered woman — especially a first-time mother … has a constant stream of visitors, particularly women… Most have breast-fed many babies themselves, and they spontaneously share their nursing wisdom. Through them, a new mother is quickly socialized into accepting an almost continual round of breast-feeding suggestions dispensed by more experienced women.”

At least the story concludes with the key point: lactation consultants are wonderful. I just wish they could have framed the story a bit differently. How about:

Breast feeding is something all mammals do and it is universally hard. Complications abound. But humans have a special trick that makes it a little easier. No, not formula and bottles, although those are wonderful when you really need them. The special trick is culture. All women around the world, rich and poor, have the same difficulty learning to nurse their babies as do women in Western societies. The one thing that all cultures have in common is that new moms are mentored by people who have a lot of experience nursing babies. In more traditional societies, these mentors are often grandmothers or aunts or sisters or mothers-in-law. But, there are lots of ways to find mentors. In the NPR listeners’ world, one sure bet is to lean on a lactation consultant. A universal human trait is that we use our culture to transfer knowledge about how to breastfeed new babies, from one generation of mothers to the next. Now, we just need to embrace it here.

A little over a year ago I was invited to speak at a conference on Major Transitions in Evolution organized by an incredibly impressive group of students at the Universidad Nacional Autónonma de México. I couldn’t resist participating given the students, the venue, and because some intellectual heavy-weights in biology and evolutionary biology were taking part too. The event did not disappoint. You can see videos of the wonderful and wide-ranging lectures here. (If you are interested, mine is the first one at this link, starting at about 2 minutes and 45 seconds in.)

Of the other speakers attending, I was particularly excited to meet Bruce Alberts. He currently holds the Chancellor’s Leadership Chair in Biochemistry and Biophysics for Science and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, after serving as the Editor-in-Chief at Science from 2009-2013 and 12 years as the President of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2014 he was the lead author on a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about the systemic flaws in biomedical research, which, I feel, serves as a commentary about biology writ large. I really wanted to meet him in person.

By crazy chance, the very first night I arrived at the hotel, I went down to the restaurant to get something to eat. Who was sitting at a table there with his wife but Bruce Alberts! I went up and introduced myself, and they very kindly invited me to join them for dinner.

While I appreciate a lot of what we talked about, and the opportunity to meet him, I can’t quite shake my feelings about something he did later in the conference. He spoke with students and told them about how he had failed his PhD defense at Harvard University. I am likely mis-remembering the details, but he talked about how he almost didn’t get his PhD and thought his career was over before it had really even started. But, he got a second chance to defend, and look what happened…

Something about this story never sat quite right with me. Instead of seeming like an inspirational story to never-give-up, it felt more like a demonstration of his privilege. He could mess up big time, but he still got a second chance to make it right. I’m not at all convinced that this applies to women and under-represented groups of people in academia.

This crossed my mind again today when I read about Jonah Lehrer. He has a new book out called “A Book About Love.” At first, I was reading the review in the New York Times and was thinking it was a book I’d like to read.

But then I realized who he is. He’s the Columbia graduate, journalist who rose to prominence very quickly a few years back but blew it all by plagiarizing, fabricating Bob Dylan quotes, and other unethical things along those lines. On outline of what happened can be found on Wikipedia.

He breeched the foundation of intellectual/journalistic/academic ethics. How do you trust someone after that? This wasn’t just one little mis-step. He did repeated, calculated ethical breeches. As I have said many times in the past, you have complete control over your integrity, but once you lose it, you can’t ever get it back. I don’t think I can trust his research and writing, no matter how much remorse he claims.

But here he is. Featured in the New York Times. Back again.

Talk about the most amazing second chance ever.

Second chances. As I think through all of the people I have known personally or have known of in academia, anectodally, second chances are not equally distributed. A second chance is a  luxury not afforded to all. For people who are not traditionally seen as members of the academy, the rule seems to be more like one-strike-you’re-out. And the strike isn’t even necessarily due to one’s own actions.

I’ve always felt on the edge professionally, that one mis-step and my chances at a successful academic career would instantly drop to zero. It is very easy to fall off the edge. This fear is why I worked, I kid you not, 10-12 hour days, almost every day of every week for close to 10 years at the start of my career. (I would not recommend this for mental health reasons.) It worked though. Here I am, tenured, and at a well-respected institution. But I was also incredibly lucky, at the right place at the right time and working very hard — it takes both.  And I was forutnate. I never needed a second chance.

Luck and second chances, we don’t really have control over those. Senior people dole those out to the junior people they think are deserving of them.

It would be interesting to survey academics to see how many men & women, and whites & minorities who made it past tenure needed and were given a second chance. The null hypothesis is that second chances are evenly distributed. The alternative hypothesis, which I am inclined to see as the more likely, is that they are most definitely not.

Have you heard of the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe? If not, I want to rectify that. From their “about” web page, it was established in 1907 “as a center for the study of the archaeology and ethnology of the American Southwest. Since 1967, the scope… has embraced a global perspective through programs to encourage advanced scholarship in anthropology and related social science disciplines and the humanities, and to facilitate the work of Native American scholars and artists.”

I was honored to take part in this mission in March of 2016 as a participant in the Advanced Seminar on Geospatial Approaches in Anthropology organized by Bob Anemone and Glen Conroy. I took part to share the satellite imagery-driven survey work Jackson Njau and I did in Tanzania, and other field work.

Ok, ok, I know some of you saw that photo and had the immediate reaction of “MAN-PANEL!” I get it. Men are starting to speak up and avoid events with such a crazy sex bias. But if you are the only woman, what do you do? Not go and let there be no representation? The composition of the group morphed a bit over the year in advance, so it wasn’t obvious until just before that it had become a man-panel. There are women who I could have suggested, but I didn’t notice early enough to speak up. I’ll pay more attention in the future.

But, I bring up the SAR seminar for a different reason.

See the guy standing behind me to the right? That’s Peter Ungar. He studies what he has dubbed “food prints”, which is a clever term that encompasses the scratches, pits, isotopes, and whatnot that food leaves on teeth. From this, he can figure out what long-extinct animals ate. It’s pretty neat work that you should check out, and maybe even buy one of his books!

Peter and I are, as you immediately see, both tooth biologists and have known each other since I was a graduate student. Over the last couple of years, we’ve talked for a few minutes as we’ve crossed paths at various conferences about why robust hominids have really robust teeth and what they used them for.

Background: There was a hominid living in eastern Africa and another living in southern Africa millions of years ago. They have huge molars and premolars, and very little incisors and canines. These features are associated with huge masticatory anatomy — the bones and muscle attachments of the jaws. We know they must have been eating an impressively difficult diet, but what was it? Did both species eat the same thing? Do they look similar because of shared ancestor or convergence?

From the “food prints”, it turns out that they were apparently eating different things. But, why would they have such similar shaped teeth if one of them was eating moreso leaves than the other?

The work I do brings a consideration of the underlying genetics to solving this conundrum.

From the developmental genetics research done on mice, lots of genes are involved in making cusps and configuring their placement on a molar. It is a complicated mechanism, and we scientists are still figuring it out.

In contrast, all of the genetics resarch to date suggests that the genetic mechanisms that influence whether or not a primate has thick or thin enamel is pretty simple. For example, my colleagues and I figured out that variation in molar enamel thickness doesn’t have any genetic correlation with tooth size or body size or anything else we could think of to test (see Hlusko et al. 2004 American Journal of Physical Anthropology “Genetics and evolution of primate enamel thickness: A baboon model”).  (By the way, that was an amazing paper to write — I should blog about that one of these days…)

Peter and I were pretty sure that these two huge-toothed hominid species look alike not because of adaptation to eating the same foods, but because of the underlying genetic architecture of dental variation. Both species had adapted to eating foods that were hard to process, although these were different types of foods. The simpler genetic architecture of enamel thickness in primates meant that thicker enamel could more readily evolve in response to the selective pressures of these more challenging diets. Pointy cusped teeth may be more ideal for eating leaves, but evolving them takes longer than does evolving thicker enamel because the underlying genetics is more complex.

And so, the first evolutionary response to these challenging diets were lineages with increasing enamel thickness. Had these creatures lived for millions more years, the leaf-eaters may have ultimately been selected to have pointy cusps good for leaf-eating.

What does this have to do with geospatial approaches in anthropology?

While we were both at the SAR seminar to talk about other aspects of our research, Peter and I got to delve into a much deeper conversation about genetic architecture and foodprints. A walk around Chaco Canyon solidified our ideas. We then skipped an afternoon walk around the beautiful SAR campus to sit at the wooden dining room table to sketch out the argument. We had a manuscript submitted within weeks, and just two days ago, our hypothesis was published as a Perspective (“Evolutionary Path of least resistance“) in Science.

This experience has reinforced to me the benefit of professional meetings, and especially, of the tremendous value in putting academics together for longer periods of time to contemplate and discuss. There are very few institutions that provide this kind of forum, and SAR is one of them. And, an important one at that. Thank you to the amazing SAR staff who made this possible, even though it is an off-shoot of the original intent of the seminar. The geospatial work is coming…