Two days ago I found myself on the bus out of Manhattan. The trip was a treat - I had managed a few hours with a dear friend. As the bus crawled through commute hour traffic I wondered about the odds of deep friendships like these. The path to this one involves great leaps of serendipity that I easily trace back to watching someone stare at the ceiling in a Connecticut auditorium fifteen years ago.. I asked them why. If I hadn't the path probably wouldn't have appeared and I wouldn't know several people on this list. Perhaps there would be other paths. You wonder about chance versus inevitability. And that leads to much deeper questions
I spent a good deal of my teenage years in the wilderness between The Bob and Glacier in Montana and Banff and Jasper in Alberta with a few excursions to British Columbia. Meeting two physicists in a small cosmic ray station by chance on Sulphur Mountain in Banff that was one of the sparks that defined my education, but when you're surrounded by Nature there are many possibilities.
The Burgess Shale in British Columbia is so amazing so as to be borderline magic.
I was about fourteen when I met soft rockers - paleontologists - for the first time. Soft rockers do fossils and this was ground zero. Canadians are wonderful people and Canadian scientists doubly so. A slow moving science curious teenager was all they needed. That afternoon I watched as they opened the rock to fossils that were seeing sunlight for the first time in about 550 million years. I had seen a few fossils in a museum at the University of Utah, but nothing like these. In fact one of these was completely new to these experts. They whooped like kids. It was the first time I saw the ecstasy of discovery. I like Canadians.
The neat thing about this deposit and a few others nearby is they're wonderfully preserved records of the Middle Cambrian. Even down to soft tissued plants and critters. You've probably heard the term 'Cambrian Explosion.' It was a relatively short period when most of what we'd call animals appeared. It was explosive in that the rate of diversification was far larger than anything seen on Earth. The Burgess Shale is the best recording device for the period, so paleontologists and, more recently, paleoclimatologists are on it like flies at a picnic.
Soon afterward much of this diversity abruptly disappeared. There were so many paths life could have taken - some completely bizarre. The question that gnaws on you is what if you could press rewind on time ... what if you when back to the middle of the Cambrian and let time run forward again. How would life evolve? Would we exist?
It's a delicious question that seems purely theoretical at first glance. Many maintain that evolution is pure chance while others maintain there may be an inevitable structure. But then Richard Lenski came along with a time machine.
He had this neat idea. It hit him that bacteria quickly go through generations. He decided to look for signals of evolution on a time scale humans might witness. He started with a dozen populations of E. coli bacteria in early 1988 and watched and waited. There were problems with funding, electrical outages and the like, but now they're around the 65,000 generation mark with the experiment is still running.
The results were and are amazing. Some evolutionary adaptations occurred in all of the populations, but others were unique to a single population. At least one, the ability to use an odd substance as a carbon source in an aerobic environment, created a bizarrely unique form of E. coli.
Other somewhat different approaches show similar results - there is some evolutionary convergence, but divergence is more common - much more common.
Lenski won a MacArthur for his work bringing some meaning to what the award is about. He had created something of a time machine for studying evolution.
For me this is a beautiful result. We're really unique. That is something to treasure and nurture. We need to make our condition better and help each other as it's up to us. As the bus turned onto I-78 I found myself smiling thinking about those deeply improbable and completely unique friendships.
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Recipe corner
I've been playing around with ice cream this Summer. I'm not eating much, but the temptation to do something different is there. I was caramelizing some onions.... The base is an adaptation of one of the standards...
Caramelized Onion Ice Cream
Ingredients
° 1/2 cup of thinly sliced yellow onions
° 2 Tbl unsalted butter
° 1/2 cup white granulated sugar
° 2/3 cup red wine
° 1 orange .. juice and grate .. set the zest aside
° 4 egg yolks
° 1 large egg
° 2 cups whole milk
° 1/2 cup heavy cream
° 1 Tbl balsamic vinegar (go for good here, but not the super expensive 25 year old variety:-)
Technique
° caramelize the onions in the butter and 1/4 cup of sugar using your favorite method. Go for deep brown caramelization without burning (I put them in boiling water for about 5 minutes on similar and then drain, dry. melt butter in a pan, add sugar and then onions,... brown for 15 to 20 minutes)
° add wine, OJ, zest and boil until reduced by half. This smells good
° whisk the egg yolks and egg and remaining sugar until you get a thick uniformly colored mixture.
° milk and cream to the onions and bring to a boil stirring along the way.
° SLOWLY add the egg mixture to the hot mix and stir stir stir.
° pour into a new pan and cook until it coats the back of a spoon. Don't let it boil.
° strain to a clean bowl and add the vinegar
° chill to refrigerator temperatures
° churn freeze
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