Akron Physics Club

Newsletter

MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT: MAY 18, 2009
(That's the third Monday this time)

Tangier, 532 West Market Street, 6:00 PM- Dinner at 6:30

RESERVATIONS or REGRETS by Thursday, May 14th to:
Reservation Secretary Charlie Wilson: cww3mmwilson@juno.com
(330) 836-4167

     Our last meeting before fall will bring us another NASA speaker.  Dr. Sasi Pillay, a mechanical engineer who earned his PhD in Computer Engineering is Chief Information Officer for NASA Glen — in which capacity he has won several awards.  He will present a program that promises a collection of exciting Power Point slides and animations entitled:

HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING & VISUALIZATION:

ITS IMPACT ON NASA'S MISSION AND PROGRAM

     And as an hors d’oeuvre (or perhaps as dessert for our last program, reported below), your secretary is planning to display his recently-acquired fossil of some very early life forms, which are some 2.1 billion years old.  They are  stromatolites —semi-circular rings (or chains) of cyanobacteria, a kind of primitive algae that is one of the first examples of oxygen-generating chlorophyll — which created an atmosphere in which Dr. Lovejoy’s animals could thrive, be fruitful, and evolve.

 

VISITORS ARE WELCOME - COLLEGE STUDENTS are FREE

(But everybody needs a dinner reservation!)

Minutes for April 27
          

     The speaker for our April meeting attracted nearly thirty reservations, including a number of guests. When Speaker Ernst von Meerwall invited their introduction, your secretary introduced Linda Whitman, Professor of Archaeology in the University of Akron’s Department of Anthropology, Archaeology, and Classical Studies; Lynn Whitman, recently “retired” Professor of Anthropology, same department, but now a Research Associate who, still being a Senior Distinguished Lecturer, continues to deliver distinguished lectures; and Ed Metzger, retired president of Metzger Photo Supply.  Actually, there was more said at the time — the total characterized by Chairman Ernst as “very comprehensive introductions.” 

     Charlie Wilson introduced son Will and his wife, Pam, who were visiting from Canada (and Will volunteered for the evening’s duties of Name Tag Marshall Bob Erdman, whose back, we hope, won’t require surgery.)  Claire Tessier then introduced Jessica (her and Wiley Youngs’ daughter), who will be a freshman at UA in the fall, and who has an interest in anthropology.  And finally, a so-far unidentified member/attendee (who was too far away for your secretary’s digital Olympus recorder, or for his analog hearing aid) – introduced his (therefore nameless) wife.  Sorry about that! 

     At which point Treasurer Dan Galehouse was invited to entertain the multitude by reciting the complex arithmetic involved in accounting for the continued (unwanted!) growth of our wealth, which began at $356.60 and finished the evening with $367.60 (plus the student dinner fund), which growing amount Treasurer Daniel is obligated to carry back and forth in cash in its designated polyesther-polypropylene box because it is too trivial an amount for any Akron bank to accept as a legitimate bank account.  [But no, we haven’t asked since the current economic crisis descended.]

     Ernst then called on Program Chair Sam Fielding-Russell, who described the NASA program featured above, the last of his outstanding collection of offerings for the past season — after which Sam asked all of us to recommend both a speaker and a subject (in that order) for the new season beginning in September.

     Which brought us to the annual festivities that accompany the nominations (and this time the election) of the highly contested roles of the Akron Physics Club’ Officers, as prescribed by our bylaws, authored by Founder Charlie Wilson, who conducted the attendant ceremonies.  Charles III reported, however, that after several weeks of solicitation for nominations, he had been “underwhelmed” by the response.  Accordingly, we are stuck with almost the same menu we have had for years:
           

     But the good news was that we now have two new, very welcome Associate Officer candidates:  Chuck Lavan has agreed to be Associate Treasurer (a fairly miserable job, as Dan Galehouse can testify), and Dave Sours, who will be Associate Nametag Marshall (not quite as bad, as long as one remembers to collect all of them after every meeting, take them home, and bring them back next time).  With little pretense of Roberts Rules of Order, we then, somehow, got a (muted) vote by acclamation of Charlie’s hard-won nominees.

     At last, to the relief of the multitude, Chairman Ernst introduced our speaker for the evening, Dr. Owen Lovejoy, Professor of Anthropology at Kent State University, who, fortunately, has received so many honors (including having been elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences) that they enabled Ernst to fill the time necessary for Claire Tessier to overcome a technical projector/power supply crisis, successfully getting our speaker’s Power Point visuals to project so that our speaker’s program could proceed.

     A biological anthropologist, Dr. Lovejoy has been teaching at Kent State since 1968, during which he has published scores of papers resulting from his research in subjects ranging from biomechanics, forensics, and skeletal biology to human evolution, the origin of man, and the basis for human intelligence — not to mention sexual dimorphism in australopithecus afarensis and hominid properties of a pliocene proximal femur from Maka, Middle Awash, Ethiopia (a work in progress).  The title of his talk for the April Akron Physics Club was Human Origins:  More than Phylogeny.

     After explaining how the invention of the electron microscope revolutionized the study of anatomy (reducing it to the cellular level), Dr. Lovejoy reported that his own interest has always been in the history of the human species, and how we came to be a cognitive form of life — questions first raised Thomas Huxley, a contemporary of Darwin and author of “Man’s Place in Nature” (1863), who regarded it as the “ultimate question in nature.”  These two subjects would encompass the rest of our speaker’s captivating presentation, with emphasis on the human fossil record. 

     Following the period of Neanderthals, he said, the earliest recognized hominid ancestors found to date have been Pithecantropus Afarensus in southern and eastern Africa — the most famous of whom is “Lucy” (discovered in 1980), who lived about 3.2 million years ago.  However, some new and exciting fossils (pushing the date of our last common ancestors to 8 or 9 million years ago) have been located farther north on the continent, and these will be the subject of a new paper by Dr. Lovejoy to be published in September. It may be the period when apes and other human predecessors (with their remarkably similar DNA) had just separated.  A recent find of a partial skeleton about 4.4 million years old is especially exciting.

     Showing us the skeletal structure of some of the great apes compared with the modern human skeleton, our speaker demonstrated their remarkable similarities, but pointed out that their primary differences were in their equipment for locomotion — and that poses the question of why a species that locomotes in a fashion different from other animals should become cognitive.  But it became obvious that locomotion was somehow intimately involved in the production of the cognitive human species. 

     Why should bipeds, which require a completely different structural design, evolve to the smart ones?  It is, after all, as Dr. Lovejoy characterized it, “a bizarre form of locomotion” [described by older kids I knew 80 years ago as “falling and catching yourself”].  Traditional explanations include:  Seeing over tall grass to avoid predators?  (Almost any animal can stand on its hind legs to do that.)  Dominance posture?  (Same answer.)   Feeding posture?  (The amount of vegetation that grows that tall is minimal; besides, Lucy happened to be only three feet tall!)  Moreover, being bipedal increases the risk of injury, reduces agility (including running speed; climbing ability), and wipes out the possibility of “cooperatively” carrying an infant on one’s back.  It also reduces an animal’s “home range.”  Even the canine teeth (used by many males to dominate other males for sex in order to spread their genes) have nearly disappeared in humans. 

     Our speaker showed us other examples of human reproductive disadvantages, e.g., our sperm count is two orders of magnitude lower than that of other apes, we have lower sperm motility, and minimum pesticide (which kills competing sperm).  Moreover, we are the only species of mammal whose females have permanently enlarged mammary glands, which, in other mammalian females, shrink after their lactation period — a signal that she is not likely to be ovulating, thereby repelling males interested in mating [a reaction quite different from that of most human males!].  

     One major advantage of bipedality, our speaker explained, is the ability to carry food — especially a high-protein gift by a male to a female, which, in great apes, makes her receptive to cohabitation for at least a day and a half.  So, “instead of competing with other males,” our speaker explained, “and aggressively keeping them away from females, do the opposite and exchange food for sex, and your chances for being the sire of any offspring go way up — especially if you don’t know whether she’s available for impregnation or not.”  Furthermore, it will tend to make the female more likely to choose you over other males “because she doesn’t know whether they’re going to be good providers or not.”  And ultimately she will be attracted to males who, instead of fighting with other males, cooperate with them to hunt and gather food. 

     Dr. Lovejoy explained something called the r/K cycle in reproductive strategy.  Some animals, the rs, seek survival of their species by having large numbers of offspring.  That strategy takes so much of their time that they have to rely on instinct; it takes up their whole lives; they don’t have time to learn.  The Ks, who generally have much lower sperm count, take time to nurture individual offspring rather than just having more of them.  Dart frogs are classic Ks.  Both male and female frogs actually carry individual tadpoles on their backs, take them to a part of the pool that is their own home range, and then the female actually deposits unfertilized eggs to feed them.  So we’re not just talking about mammals. 

     Major advantages of Ks over rs include their longevity, their later sexual maturity, and, especially, male attendance to the offspring (making a case for monogamy in the process).  Dart frogs, above, have “clutch sizes” of 4 to 30, and have an average life of 13-15 years.  Their cousin, the leopard frog, try to raise 3000-6000 children and live 6-9 years — and they lack the male provisioning of the dart frog. 

     Similarly, in the bird family, Bob-Whites reach sexual maturity in a single year, lay 15 eggs which hatch in 23 days, and take their first flight 15 days later — and they die after 9 years.  By contrast, the slower-living albatross, taking 4 to 8 years to reach sexual maturity, lays a single egg, which incubates for 83 days, and although the chick doesn’t take flight until 236 days, it lives more than 40 years [as the Ancient Mariner discovered the hard way].  As the Ks have learned, the way to achieve mortality is to control the environment, or to adapt to it. The physiological advantages that have led to human survivorship and dominance, thus, are bipedality and longevity and being Ks.

     When comparing human brain size with other animals, particularly other apes (especially when both are seen in profile), our skulls appear to have twice the volume (1300 cc for us). Yet it is Dr. Lovejoy’s opinion that some birds, e.g., crows, are nearly as smart as humans — a view difficult to accept recognizing the human record (e.g., having developed such novelties as farming, literature, music, science and technology).   However, “biological evolution,” he said, “is linear. . . but cultural evolution is logarithmic.”  For humans, he pointed out, biological change hasn’t occurred in the million and a half years since tool making began.  It took 500,000 years before more precisely made, polished tools are found, and primitive agriculture began.  “The urban revolution occurred only 6000 years ago, and writing emerged about 3000 years ago.  Once writing evolved we could have the physical sciences, Newton’s calculus, nuclear energy, and the information explosion.  What we know ten years from now will be double what we know now.”

     Those are some of the things we heard from C. Owen Lovejoy [I regret leaving out the part about the subduction of tectonic plates!].  The audience kept him for more than half an hour with (hard) questions, which precipitated such observations as his finding evolution so unpredictable that “if you started it all over again 40 billion times, the chance of finding advanced cognitive life in the Milky Way is minimal.”

Jack Gieck