April 1, 2007
The Wit of Science Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:55 AM EST Scientists as a general rule are known for their brains, not their wit. But there are occasional delightful exceptions. A recent scientific paper (available here) ponders the question of why of all the great apes, only humans have two species of lice with which to contend, while gorillas and chimpanzees have one (and orangutans, luckily for them, are lice free). Of the two human lice, the head louse is related to the chimpanzee louse and, indeed, split off from it at the same time that humans diverged from chimps, about six million years ago. The human body louse, however, is closely related to the gorilla louse, having diverged only about three millions years ago. How it made the jump to humans is unknown and probably always will be. (Yes, I know what you’re thinking, but there are many innocent possibilities beyond interspecies hanky-panky.) What makes the story interesting to other than louseologists, however, is that it makes it possible to date with some precision when humans lost most of their body hair. As long as we were hirsute, there was room for only one louse, thanks to the general biological truth that only one species can occupy a single biological niche at the same time in the same place (because competition will always eliminate all but one species). But once we had hair only in certain parts of the body, with, in effect, a cordon sanitaire around our hairless necks, then two niches were created and early humans could scratch different critters in different places. So where’s the wit? The title of this in fact very serious paper is “Pair of Lice Lost or Parasites Regained: The Evolutionary History of Anthropoid Primate Lice.” This reminds me of one of the most elegant scientific jokes of all time, which first saw the light of day on April 1, 1948, 59 years ago today. On that day the premier British scientific journal, Nature, published a paper called “The Origin of Chemical Elements.” It proved to be a major, and very early, contribution to the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. Indeed, it was so early that the theory wouldn’t even acquire its popular name until 1955 (courtesy of one of its most formidable opponents, the cosmologist Fred Hoyle). The authors of “The Origin of Chemical Elements” were Ralph Alpher, then a graduate student at George Washington University and now a vastly senior and greatly honored physicist, and his advisor, the late George Gamow, a highly distinguished physicist in his own right as well as the author of many popular works of science (most famously One, Two, Three . . . Infinity, which is still in print after more than 60 years). Gamow, who was once described by a reporter as “the only scientist in America with a real sense of humor,” recognized an opportunity when he saw it, and added the name of a friend, the great physicist Hans Bethe—who in fact had little if anything to do with the paper’s creation—to the list of authors. Thus the paper would be written by Alpher, Bethe, Gamow and it’s been known as the a?? paper ever since.
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