Monday, December 16, 2019

Boris Johnson And The Worst Of Times




Boris Johnson And The Worst Of Times 


by Emrys Westacott 3 Quarks Daily

“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” 

I suspect there are many who feel that this Dickensian paradox applies to their own life and times. I certainly do. If you’re fortunate enough to have a sufficient income, a comfortable home, loving family and friends, decent physical and mental health, and plenty of interests to pursue, then life is good. But then a lying, narcissistic, cynical, conman like Boris Johnson is ensconced in power in the UK for five years, and things are not good. One dwells in the Slough of Despond. 

This odd disconnect between the relative pleasantness of one’s own circumstances and an appalled sense that, on so many counts (poverty, inequality, political corruption, news media, environmental damage…..), the world is heading in the wrong direction, has become a familiar, ever-present condition for many of us. 

Interestingly, the disconnect seems to be not only experienced by people on the left. The median household income of Trump supporters during the 2016 Republican primaries was $72,000 (compared to a national median household income figure of $56,000). Historically and geographically speaking, $72K is a decent chunk of change which for most people should make possible a fairly comfortable lifestyle. And in fact, a 2017 PRRI study concluded that Trump supporters were not so much motivated by dissatisfaction with their own economic circumstances as by fears about cultural displacement (of whites by minorities and immigrants).[1] For most of them, too, their fear, anger, and dissatisfaction concerned the state of the nation rather than their personal circumstances. 

There is always a positive aspect to anger and sorrow over the state of the world, whatever the cause: it at least means that people care about something beyond themselves and their immediate circle. There are, of course, impersonal issues that it would be better if people didn’t concern themselves with. Why should it matter to anyone, for instance, that some strangers somewhere are enjoying gay sex? But on the whole the world doesn’t suffer from too many people being excessively involved in public debates about what is best for society at large. On the contrary. 

But why the disconnect? Why is it that so many of us who, in many respects have never had it so good, are so critical, even at times despairing, of the way things are? 

Now I imagine that some readers may immediately jump all over the claim that “many of us have never had it so good,” viewing it as smug, complacent, callous, ignorant, and blind. But (a) the qualification “in many respects” is important. Noting some of the ways in which our lives have improved, even over the past few decades, doesn’t imply that everything is getting better all the time. Thanks to the computer revolution, family members and friends living far apart can now talk to each other as often as they please. This is a non-trivial improvement over the way things used to be. Pointing it out isn’t to deny that the computer revolution has had some negative consequences, such as rampant cell phone addiction. 

And (b) recognizing that millions of people live relatively comfortable lives obviously doesn’t imply that everyone is so fortunate. Scandalously, in rich societies like the US and the UK, there are millions who live in poverty and suffer all its associated consequences, and millions more who, even if not impoverished, experience insecurity, anxiety, exhaustion, or depression due to the character of work and life in a constantly changing capitalist society with inadequate public services. 

Nevertheless, few would choose to live their lives in a previous age–certainly not before anesthetics and antibiotics! And even when it comes to the past few decades, it’s easy to overlook or underestimate improvements in the way we live.[2] (Consider, for instance, the advances in gay rights, or the greater involvement of fathers in childrearing.) One reason for this “negativity bias” is that we are more keenly attuned to alarming intelligence rather than to good news, a trait that in nature has survival value and in the modern world is exploited by news media to sell their product (“if it bleeds, it leads”). Another reason is nostalgia, which seems to be an almost universal human trait, the evolutionary value of which has not yet been determined. 

But all that being said, feelings of anger, fear, disappointment and despair over the ascension to power of people like Johnson and Trump world are not prompted by delusional misrepresentations of reality. Anxiety is in order. There really does seem to be a trend in favour of cynical authoritarian rulers: Putin in Russia, Xi in China, Bolsonaro in Brazil; Erdo?an in Turkey, Modi in India, Orbán in Hungary, al-Sisi in Egypt, Salvini in Italy. These autocrats largely operate with the same playbook: nationalism; racism; hostility to vulnerable minority groups (immigrants, Muslims); willful disinformation; favours for oligarchs; anti-democratic measures that lessen accountability; highly partisan legal appointments. In some cases, most obviously that of Trump, buffoonish behaviour helps to serve as a distraction, while the rich feed at the trough and the further corruption of politics and democratic norms becomes normalized. 

When did this trend begin? It can seem to be fairly recent. After all, less than ten years ago Barack Obama was president with both houses of Congress under Democractic control, the Labour party was in power in the UK, Lula was president in Brazil, and the Arab Spring was getting underway in Egypt. But I suspect that historians of the future, when they look back on this period, will identify the beginnings of the trend about forty years ago. In 1979 Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in Britain, and in 1980 Ronald Reagan won elected president in the US. Both embraced a fairly libertarian political philosophy, the outlook given scholarly credentials by theorists like Friedrich Hayek and popularized more widely by Ayn Rand. And the growing influence of this philosophy in powerful sections of the anglosphere has had global consequences. 

Those committed to this philosophy oppose government intervention in the economy as both inefficient and morally misguided. Thus Reagan, in his first inaugural address, declared that “in this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” The outlook is thus highly individualistic. What matters above all is the right of individuals to engage in business without restrictive regulations, regardless of the consequences for society; for according to this view, as Thatcher famously remarked, “there is no such thing as society.” (Conservative politicians often present this philosophy in more general terms, as a defence of individual freedom. But their willingness over the years to outlaw such things as homosexuality, gay marriage, recreational drugs, and gambling indicates that what really matters to them is the freedom to make money and not be forced to share it through taxation and public spending.) 

Forty years ago, then, American and British capitalism began a campaign against the sort of communitarian values that had characterized their post-war societies: the sort of values that underpin the welfare state, and are found par excellence in trades unions where solidarity is placed above self-interest. This is not to idealize the way things were back then. There was, of course, plenty of prejudice, discrimination, exploitation and selfishness in those days, too. But there was also even among the ruling class, a less callous attitude toward the least well off, more faith in the power of public institutions to do good, and greater respect for democratic institutions and norms. One way of putting it would be to say conservativism then looks like social democracy now. 

A glaring consequence of the libertarian shift is the tremendous increase in inequality, not just in the US but in many other countries too. This has certainly provoked some anger: witness the Occupy movement. But the Murdoch media and other enablers of the autocrats have clearly had some success in deflecting the dissatisfaction of those who feel left behind against false enemies––immigrants, refugees, ethnic minorities, the unemployed, progressive activists, liberal “elitists,” the EU. The individualistic ideology advanced by conservatives over the past forty years has prepared a fertile soil in which this displaced–misplaced–hostility seems to thrive. Practical policies, such as weakening unions and selling off public assets, have served the same end. 

From the standpoint of anyone committed to communitarian, egalitarian, and democratic values, the shift described has been disastrous. As noted above, one’s material circumstances may have improved, largely thanks to technology, but the political culture one inhabits has become ugly and dysfunctional almost beyond belief; the social environment in many places has been impoverished; and prospects for the natural environment–about which the autocrats seem to be utterly indifferent–are not great, to put it mildly. 

Societies often take on some of the characteristics of their rulers, In the age of Johnson and Trump, this is a dispiriting thought. Yet there is a further paradox, different from the one mentioned at the outset, in which there perhaps lies hope. It’s an odd but true fact, in my experience, that there is often a disconnect between a person’s politics and the way they relate to their fellow human beings. A socialist can be an overbearing, domineering father. A Trump voter can contribute generously in time and money to a charity for refugees. Individualism, and the indifference to the wellbeing of others that it can foster, has natural limits. 

H.L Mencken said that “democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” But personally, I can’t think of anyone I know who deserves to be ruled by the likes of Boris Johnson or Donald Trump. Normal people are nicer than that and deserve better. 



[1] https://www.prri.org/research/white-working-class-attitudes-economy-trade-immigration-election-donald-trump/ 

[2] On this point, see Greg Easterbrook, The Paradox of Progress.


Wednesday, December 11, 2019

What Were Dinosaurs For?



What Were Dinosaurs For?

Verlyn Klinkenborg NY Review of Books




A life-size model of the early Cretaceous tyrannosaur Yutyrannus huali; from Mark Norell’s The World of Dinosaurs: An Illustrated Tour. Originally part of the American Museum of Natural History’s 2016 exhibition ‘Dinosaurs Among Us,’ curated by Norell, it is twenty-three feet long and is now in the permanent collection of the Dinosaur Gallery at the Center of Science and Industry, Columbus, Ohio. 

In Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth, God gathers the archangels and announces that He has made animals. Satan—who else?—asks, “What are they for?” Perhaps you can hear the strangeness, the dissonance in this question, which is the sort that marks the boundary between theology and science. Scientists have no trouble asking what the various parts of an organism are for or what function it has in a food web or an ecosystem. But they tend not to ask Satan’s question because it offers no hypotheses to be tested. What are animals for? Here is God’s chilly answer: “They are an experiment in Morals and Conduct. Observe them, and be instructed.” So Satan goes to Earth and soon concludes that “the people are all insane, the other animals are all insane, the earth is insane, Nature itself is insane.” 

You might say of Twain, as Walter Benjamin said of Charles Baudelaire, that his “satanism must not be taken too seriously”—that speaking in the voice of a disillusioned archangel merely allowed Twain “to sustain a nonconformist position.” Yet Letters from the Earth was withheld from publication by Twain’s daughter until 1962, and it tends to come festooned with editorial disclaimers blaming its antireligious cynicism on the circumstances of his old age, as if the book were merely a late, funebral fugue, unrelated to the rest of his work. In fact, Satan is the Connecticut Yankee in extremis, a rational being in an irrational world. 

Why do I mention all this? As I was reading some recent books on dinosaurs, I kept wondering, “What were dinosaurs for?” It’s a ridiculous question, and I wondered why I was wondering it. After all, dinosaurs were “for” exactly what we are “for,” what every organism has been “for” since life began. Every species that has ever lived is a successful experiment in the enterprise of living, and every species is closely kinned at the genetic level with all other species. This is harder to grasp than it seems, partly because the logic of that Satanic preposition—“for”—is so insidious, so woven through the problem of time. Teleology is the moralizing of chronology, and nowadays science tries to keep watch for even the slightest trace of it, any suggestion that evolution has a direction tending to culminate in us or in what we like to call intelligence or in any other presumably desirable end point. 

But the obvious, quotidian logic of chronology is basically too much for the human mind: we’re constantly confusing sequence, causation, and purpose. Because we come after, it’s easy to suppose we must be the purpose of what came before. That’s what recent generations of humans have supposed and continue to suppose. Such is the nervous logic of living not only in the present but also at the constantly moving end point of the chronology of life on Earth. 

There’s also another view: the belief that humans have, by our intelligence and adaptability, somehow won through to global dominance where dinosaurs failed thanks to their inadequacy. This assumption is parodied in the early stanzas of Wis?awa Szymborska’s ironic poem “Dinosaur Skeleton,” which might well have been called “Eleven Ways of Looking at a Fossil.” “Ladies, Gentlemen,” she writes in a docent-like voice, “a head this size does not have room for foresight,/and that is why its owner is extinct.” There’s a bland wonder in those words, a familiar mixture of surprise and easy contempt that was common, even among specialists, as late as the early twentieth century. It was put to rest only when it became apparent that dinosaurs, whose often astonishing heads were as suitable as ours, had nothing to do with their own demise. In 1980 a small team of scientists discovered that an asteroid had plunged into Earth some 66 million years ago, extinguishing most of the life on this planet, including all the non-avian dinosaurs2—the fifth of the five major prehistoric extinctions. As Marcia Bjornerud explains in Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World (2018): 

The great mass extinctions challenge any conceit that we are the triumphant culmination of 3.5 billion years of evolution. Life is endlessly inventive, always tinkering and experimenting, but not with a particular notion of progress. 

We’re now in the midst of another mass extinction, driven by the global proliferation of humans (7.7 billion and counting) and our frenzied economic activity. And we’re only now “arranging to get frightened” (as Twain wrote, recalling the 1906 earthquake) by the probable consequences of anthropogenic climate change. It has become impossible to think about extinction in the old ways, to regard the end-Cretaceous demise of some 80 percent of life on earth as a remote, alien fact. “Distinguished Guests,” says Szymborska’s docent, “we’re in far better shape in this regard,/life is beautiful and the world is ours.” Life is indeed beautiful, and the world has surely been ours, for the smallest while. One begins to regard with a certain empathy the creatures who were there to witness the asteroid, to recognize in them—no matter how savagely they’ve been portrayed—the innocence present in all animals. The means of our fate, the potential extinction of Homo sapiens, will be different—not an asteroid, perhaps, but global ecological devastation—and it will be our fault. Szymborska: “So much responsibility in place of a vanished tail.” 

There’s a long tradition of agonistic dinosaur portraiture, great beasts roaring and chomping with a special prehistoric savagery. Their size and the nature of their weaponry has stirred a primal terror in humans ever since they were first discovered. But it’s not just the creatures that cause this. It’s also the way they embody the shock of the Darwinian outlook on life. In Darwin’s Plots (1983), her classic study of evolutionary narrative, Gillian Beer notes that “the unused, or uncontrolled, elements in metaphors such as ‘the struggle for existence’ take on a life of their own” outside the particular scientific claims of Darwin’s theory, and those elements rampage across the pages of popular science writing about dinosaurs. 

Take, for instance, Steve Brusatte’s recent book, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. Brusatte is a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh, working at the forefront of phylogenetic research. The purpose of this book is to tell the tale of dinosaurs and what we now know about them, with special emphasis on the work of young researchers. But Brusatte is also a writer of what he calls “pop-science,” and we are its victims. Here he is on the life-span of Tyrannosaurus rex: “You could call T. rex the James Dean of dinosaurs: it lived fast and died young.” And when it matured, in Brusatte’s words, “the Rex was all man, all woman, and ready to claim its throne.” It’s enough to make you wish that Henry Osborn—the paleontologist and head of the American Museum of Natural History in the early twentieth century—had called the species Tyrannosaurus civis, if only to forestall the monarchical metaphors.3 

This kind of writing isn’t merely exuberant nonsense, the metaphorical stumblings of an excitable scientist. It’s language that works against the grain of the science it’s trying to explain. To say, as Brusatte does, that acidifying oceans, capable of dissolving the shells of sea creatures, are “why we don’t bathe in vinegar” is ridiculous. So is calling the feather “nature’s ultimate Swiss Army knife.” But to write these words—“dinosaurs at the top of their game, doing as well or better than they had ever done, still in control”—is to violate something basic in our understanding of how life actually works. “Still in control” of what, exactly? Or consider this sentence, describing the effects of the asteroid strike: “The reign of the dinosaurs ended and a revolution followed, forcing them to cede their kingdom to other species.” Whatever forces were at work as that old world changed, they’re overwhelmed and obscured by the accidental forces unleashed in this terrible sentence, which sounds as though the histories of the Bourbons and the sauropods were somehow intertwined. However thoughtful he may be as a scientist, Steve Brusatte has created a lost world of his own, where metaphors war anachronistically in defiance of what scientists understand. He didn’t invent this kind of writing. He grew up on it, and sadly we’re surrounded by it. 

A far better book is Dinosaurs Rediscovered: The Scientific Revolution in Paleontology by Michael J. Benton, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol and the author of several superb books on his field. Benton’s prose is a model of science writing—energetic without being hyperactive, illustrative without loosing a swarm of irritating metaphors, alive to the reader’s curiosity without pandering to the reader’s ignorance. To Benton, the story of what we know about dinosaurs is also the story of how we know it. (This is a subtext of Brusatte’s book, too, and of Mark Norell’s.) It’s a tale that’s been repeated in recent decades all across the biological sciences—how a modest branch of natural history became “a highly technical, computational, and thoroughly scientific field today.” 

Dinosaur fossils are still unearthed from rock of appropriate ages in remote places, and they’re still discovered by private collectors and official expeditions using techniques (and often attitudes) that hark back to the late nineteenth century. But they’re found all over the planet now.4 And in the lab, they’re subjected to probing new methods of examination, including CT scans (depicting brain and sinus cavities), synchrotron light sources (detecting color), cladistic analysis (discerning relationships), and sophisticated modeling by engineers (revealing how dinosaurs walked and bit). The fossils flood in, and “every day turns up something new,” as Edward FitzGerald put it in 1845—new species, new relationships among species, new understanding of how dinosaurs lived, what they ate, what they looked like, how they reproduced, and how their bodies worked. The transformation in what we know about them is astonishing. And all of it from fossilized bones. 

Perhaps the easiest way to glimpse the effect of all this new knowledge is to leaf through Mark Norell’s The World of Dinosaurs: An Illustrated Tour. Norell is one of the principal paleontologists of our time and a major figure at the American Museum of Natural History. In this book, he reveals the extraordinary distance between the look of actual fossils—nearly monochromatic tangles of bones—and the appearance and behavior of the creatures who left them, as reconstructed by recent research. The latest reconstruction of Styracosaurus albertensis, a herbivorous dinosaur from the late Cretaceous found in western North America, wears a brightly colored frontispiece (a “fenestrated frill”) that resembles Native American beadwork and may have been what Norell calls a “display structure.” Mononykus olecranus, a Mongolian dinosaur also from the late Cretaceous, is adorned with feathers in the colors of dozens of bird species, from indigo bunting to red-tailed hawk, and has single-clawed arms as strange as those on T. rex, though perhaps more functional. The World of Dinosaurs—which comes, shamefully enough, without notes or references of any kind—is a reminder that our imaginations tend to normalize the strangeness of nature, and that one of the immense virtues of science is its unceasing ability to defamiliarize what we thought we knew. 

In a sense, paleontology is recovering from the sobriety of its earliest speculations. Studying its history is like watching the Iguanodon in a mid-nineteenth-century black-and-white illustration slowly assume its proper shape and dimensions and then, suddenly, pop with color and behavior. It’s now widely accepted that birds are in fact dinosaurs. But until recently this seemed to say more about birds than about dinosaurs. Only in the last few years have scientists begun to explore the idea that dinosaurs resembled birds in all sorts of ways—bearing colored feathers and laying colored eggs and enjoying ultra-efficient respiration. As the number of known dinosaur species grows (seven hundred and counting), the complexity of the background picture increases. What’s emerging is something vastly richer than the parade-ground view of dinosaurs, lined up by era or height, or the diorama view (fixed or cinematic) depicting prehistoric creatures in characteristic poses in a characteristic landscape. 

Yet it’s still far easier for us to imagine a dinosaur somehow visiting the world we inhabit today—like the T. rex model newly on display at the American Museum of Natural History, fleshed and feathered and with eyes wet and baleful—than it is to imagine the many worlds that the many species of dinosaurs inhabited over their roughly 180 million years on Earth. We can marvel at the size of one of the giant sauropods, but can we imagine the air it breathed or the plants it ate or the soil they grew in? Can we picture its moon circling nearer than ours to an earth spinning faster than ours? Can we really grasp how differently the land masses were arranged and the effects that would have had on climate? Or the consequences of extensive volcanism or the flipping of magnetic poles? 

We’re a long way from understanding those ancient worlds as ecosystems. And humans are perhaps an even longer way from acknowledging that we as a species are descended not only from the tiny mammals alive at the time, scurrying nocturnally among the dinosaurs, but from their ecosystem as a whole, which shaped both dinosaurs and mammals together.5 This, too, is hard to imagine—the tangled web of lineages leading from ecosystem to ecosystem. But the more clearly you picture the history of life as an unbroken series of ecosystems, and not just a line of related species, the more clearly you understand the tragedy of what we’re doing to Earth, the consequences of depleting the planet we like to claim we’ve inherited. 

In a sense, there’s something archaic about the popular obsession with dinosaurs as species. We see them almost as we see ourselves, foreshortened, detached from their ecosystem and unanchored from the deep temporal lineages that produced them. It’s our habit to imagine dinosaurs as if they were frozen in time the way their bones have been, forgetting that they’re the avatars of ancient processes, like the basaltic columns on the edge of the New Jersey Palisades. In part, that’s because thinking about dinosaurs means trying to look into deep time, which is simply inconceivable. We can’t feel it in our bones, nor do the fossilized bones of dinosaurs, surfacing in the present, really convey it. Most of the analogies used to illustrate it fail because they’re spatial analogies, like John McPhee’s English yard, in which all of Earth’s history is “the distance from the King’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand” and all of human history could be extinguished with “one stroke of a nail file.” We can’t feel the depth of time because we believe it has been erased, even though every life-form on the planet (including ourselves) is floating in a bubble of space-time on the surface of an ocean of deep time. 

Imagine a sixty-seven-year- old human, like me, the author of this essay. The asteroid that extinguished the dinosaurs fell roughly a million times longer ago than the number of years I’ve been alive. That’s astounding, but it leaves almost no psychological impression. And that’s merely the temporal distance to the near threshold of the age of dinosaurs, which began roughly 245 million years ago. Our imaginations are essentially atemporal. To human minds, time isn’t transparent. It’s invisible. 

What are dinosaur fossils for? That’s the question behind The Dinosaur Artist: Obsession, Betrayal and the Quest for Earth’s Ultimate Trophy by Paige Williams and Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle by Lukas Rieppel. Scientific uses apart, it turns out that dinosaur fossils are for making and losing scads of money and for converting scads of money into symbolic capital rooted in acts of cultural prestige, like funding expeditions and building museums big enough to hold dinosaur skeletons. Using very different focal lengths, both The Dinosaur Artist and Assembling the Dinosaur remind the reader that fossils enter a cultural matrix the moment they emerge from the geological matrix in which they’ve been bound. “Because dinosaurs are in part creatures of the imagination,” Rieppel writes, “they reveal a great deal about the time and place in which they were found, studied, and put on display.” For Rieppel, who teaches history at Brown University, the time and place is America “from the end of Reconstruction to the start of the Great Depression.” For Williams, a staff writer at The New Yorker, the place is Florida and the time just a few years ago, when a man named Eric Prokopi went to prison for importing a Mongolian dinosaur skeleton and trying to sell it at auction. 

One of the pleasures of The Dinosaur Artist is learning so much more than you thought you wanted to know about almost anything that wanders over the book’s horizon—such as the art of wading for sunken cypress logs or the intricacies of do-it-yourself fossil preparation or the recent history of Mongolian politics and its ties to American conservatives. Another is Williams’s prose: playful, allusive, and truly alive to the joy of trekking through a landscape full of quirks and quarries and sunken logs. Paige Williams is a reader’s ideal companion. “If you, yourself, would like to become a fossil,” she begins in the introduction, and then tells you how to go about it. (Quick burial in sedimentary rock is her main tip.) 

Behind the Prokopi tale—fanatical fossil-hound runs afoul of feds—is a grim boom-and-bust story of modern America. Prokopi begins by collecting shark’s teeth as a child under the guidance of his mother. By the time he’s arrested, he and his wife have leveraged everything, including their marriage, many times over. It was a “feast-to-famine life,” Williams writes, and the only thing that made it unusual was the fact that it was based on finding, buying, preparing, and selling dinosaur fossils. If there’s a moral to this story, it has something to do with the interesting ways in which Americans go bankrupt. But it really concerns the fate of fossils: whether they remain in the realm of science—carefully monitored from the moment they’re detected in a rocky outcrop somewhere—or whether they vanish, shedding their scientific value, into a shadowy world of commerce and private ownership. 

And this is where Lukas Rieppel comes in. Assembling the Dinosaur is a penetrating study of legitimacy and capitalism in the realm of fossils. It traces the parallel growth of paleontology and the public museums in which dinosaur fossils often end up being housed and studied and displayed. Rieppel’s questions are pointed and his answers eye-opening. How did it happen that museums began pursuing vertical integration—controlling the fate of fossils from their first discovery—just when American corporations were beginning to do so? Is it possible to create symbolic value and legitimize “status and wealth” by removing objects like dinosaur bones from the market? Are dinosaurs “a fitting emblem for modern capitalism” or do they depict “the poverty of an older, laissez-faire model of social organization that much of the economic elite had already come to regard as obsolete”? And, finally, how did a “progressivist narrative” come to prevail, “in which the extinction of dinosaurs made space for the evolution of more intelligent mammals”? 

Reading Rieppel is a little like watching the sudden, recent feathering of dinosaurs. Once-familiar creatures take on a completely new look, and so do the institutions that house them. Perhaps what Rieppel is studying, really, is the way museums distinguish themselves, intellectually and economically, from the Barnum-like hustle of their dime-museum predecessors. It’s a more tenuous process than you’d think, especially when you watch an institution like the American Museum of Natural History passing, in Rieppel’s pages, through the ideological bottleneck of Henry Osborn’s leadership in the 1920s and 1930s—a time marked by intellectualized racism, fascination with eugenics, and blithe approval of Hitler’s Germany. “Care for the race, even if the individual must suffer,” Osborn wrote. The museum seems now to be a more purified place. And yet it’s worth reading Rieppel on the work of legacy-laundering before you stop by to see the newest T. rex in its David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing. 

Inevitably, Assembling the Dinosaur complicates the familiar narrative of scientific progress. Rieppel argues that “a scientific practice like vertebrate paleontology is not fundamentally different from other products of human culture.” This means, of course, that it’s subject to the economic and ideological distortions that can affect any product of human culture. I felt a disturbing reluctance to follow Rieppel down the path of this very sensible argument. And now I understand why. All my life, I’ve known the answer to the question, What is science for? Rieppel reminds me that there are other answers too, rooted not in the pursuit of knowledge but in the economic interplay of human needs and desires. When I finished reading Assembling the Dinosaur, I found myself going back—for solace, I admit—to Michael Benton’s book, where he quotes these remarkable words from John Hutchinson, a professor of evolutionary biomechanics: “The ground we walk on is that of science itself: clear, reproducible data and tools, a spirit of sharing and professionalism, and open-mindedness.” This is the ground that must be kept open—against the repeated narrowing of the human mind. 



What Were Dinosaurs For? 

Verlyn Klinkenborg 

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World 

by Steve Brusatte 

William Morrow, 404 pp., $29.99 

Dinosaurs Rediscovered: The Scientific Revolution in Paleontology 

by Michael J. Benton 

Thames and Hudson, 320 pp., $34.95 

The World of Dinosaurs: An Illustrated Tour 

by Mark A. Norell 

University of Chicago Press, 239 pp., $32.50 

The Dinosaur Artist: Obsession, Betrayal and the Quest for Earth's Ultimate Trophy 

by Paige Williams 

Hachette, 410 pp., $28.00 

Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle 

by Lukas Rieppel 

Harvard University Press, 325 pp., $29.95 

A few fossil bones in clay and limestone have opened a greater vista back into Time than the Indian imagination ventured upon for its Gods: and every day turns up something new. 

—Edward FitzGerald to E.B. Cowell, January 28, 18451

Wednesday, December 04, 2019

Fake Meat vs. Real Meat



Fake Meat vs. Real Meat


Millennials are gobbling down plant-based burgers, prompting meat producers to question the health benefits of “ultra-processed imitations.”




Credit...Evan Sung for The New York Times


By Anahad O’Connor NY Times

The meat industry has a warning for consumers: Beware of plant-based meat.

That is the message behind a marketing campaign by the Center for Consumer Freedom, a public relations firm whose financial supporters have included meat producers and others in the food industry. In recent weeks the group has placed full-page ads in The New York Times and other newspapers raising health concerns about plant-based meat substitutes like the Impossible Burger and the Beyond Burger, which are designed to look, taste and even appear to bleed like real meat.

The ads call them “ultra-processed imitations” with numerous ingredients. “What’s hiding in your plant-based meat?” asks one ad featuring a sad face made of two patties and sausage. Another directs readers to a site that compares plant-based burgers to dog food. In November, the group’s managing director, Will Coggin, wrote an opinion piece in USA Today that labeled fake meats as ultra-processed foods that can spur weight gain, although the research on processed foods has not included plant-based meats. A few days later, the center’s executive director, Rick Berman, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal criticizing plant-based meats as highly processed and no healthier than meat. Its headline: “‘Plant-Based Meat’ Is All Hat and No Cattle.”

Impossible Foods, which makes a popular plant-based burger, said the campaign was misleading and fear-mongering. The company says plant-based meat alternatives are better for consumers and better for the planet, requiring less land and water and producing fewer greenhouse gas emissions than meat from cattle. The new “disinformation” campaign, they say, is a sign that Impossible Foods’ mission — to disrupt the meat industry and replace animals in the food system — is working. “It’s a point of pride to have that organization come after us,” said Pat Brown, the company’s chief executive. “It’s hard to imagine a stronger endorsement.” (The Center for Consumer Freedom did not respond to requests for an interview.)



ImagePlant-based foods like the Impossible Burger are designed to look, taste, even bleed like real meat.Credit...Con Poulos for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.


Unlike other vegetarian meat substitutes, the new plant-based burgers are winning over meat lovers. The market research firm NPD Group says that 90 percent of the customers purchasing them are meat-eaters who believe the products are more healthful and better for the environment, said Darren Seifer, an analyst at NPD, which recently predicted that plant-based meats will have staying power because of their popularity with millennials.


“The two big brands, Beyond and Impossible, have replicated the burger experience without having to sacrifice the taste of the burger,” he said. “So now a lot of consumers feel like they have a healthier option, they are reducing the amount of meat they consume, and they just feel better about that.”

But are plant-based meats really better for you than meat? It depends on how you eat them, said Dr. Frank Hu, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Replacing a hamburger with a plant burger is not an improvement in diet quality if you chase it with French fries and a sugar-laden soda, Dr. Hu said.

For consumers trying to choose the healthiest option, Dr. Hu said studies comparing the metabolic effects of eating beef burgers versus plant burgers are currently underway. In the meantime, he considers the meat substitutes “transitional foods” for people who are trying to adopt more healthful diets.

In August, Dr. Hu, along with a group of health and climate experts, published a report in JAMA that explored whether plant-based meats can be part of a “healthy low-carbon diet.” Studies show that replacing red meat with nuts, legumes and other plant foods can lower mortality and chronic disease risk, but it’s not possible to extrapolate that processed burgers made with purified soy or pea protein will have the same health benefits, said Dr. Hu.

Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat say the building blocks of their burgers are plants. The Beyond Burger has about 18 ingredients, including purified pea protein, coconut and canola oils, rice protein, potato starch and beet juice extract for coloring. Beyond Meat says it uses no genetically modified or artificially produced ingredients.

The Impossible Burger is made with similar basic ingredients but it gets its protein largely from soy and potato, and it uses an iron-containing compound from soy called heme to enhance the burger’s meaty flavor. Both products use methylcellulose, a plant derivative commonly used in sauces and ice cream, as a binder.

Compared to a beef patty, the Impossible and Beyond burgers have similar amounts of protein and calories, with less saturated fat and no cholesterol. They also contain fiber; real meat does not. But compared to real beef, the two plant-based burgers are considerably higher in sodium, containing about 16 percent of the recommended daily value. An uncooked four-ounce beef patty has about 75 milligrams of sodium, compared to 370 milligrams of sodium in the Impossible Burger and 390 milligrams in the Beyond Burger.



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Credit...Ben Margot/Associated Press

This fall, Burger King said it had its most successful quarter in four years, driven by sales of its plant-based Impossible Whopper. Dunkin’ Donuts announced it was rolling out a breakfast sandwich made with Beyond Meat sausages in 9,000 of its stores after a successful trial run in New York City. More than 50,000 grocery stores and restaurants, including fast food chains like Subway, White Castle, KFC and Carl’s Jr., carry products from Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods.

Despite the popularity of plant-based burgers, beef burgers are still overwhelmingly the more popular choice at restaurants. Americans purchased 6.4 billion beef burgers at quick service restaurants during the 12 months that ended in May, compared to 228 million plant-based burgers in the same period.

While meat consumption in America is at an all-time high, many Americans have shifted from eating beef to poultry. In the past three decades, beef intake has fallen by about a third, while chicken intake has more than doubled and pork intake has remained fairly steady. Studies show that cost, convenience and health concerns are among the top reasons Americans have cut back on beef.

But the health messages about red meat have been confusing. Earlier this year, a group of scientists challenged decades of nutrition advice, saying that warnings linking red meat consumption to heart disease and cancer are not backed by strong scientific evidence, though it was later revealed that the study’s lead author had past research ties to an industry group whose members include fast food companies and a beef processor.

Meat producers are taking the fight against fake meat to lawmakers. At least 25 states have introduced bills making it illegal to use the words “beef” or “meat” on products made from plant ingredients or cultured meat that is grown in a lab. Missouri became the first state to pass such a law last year, which was initially proposed by the Missouri Cattlemen’s Association.

In October, Representative Roger Marshall, a Republican from Kansas and the top recipient of livestock industry donations in the House, introduced a federal bill that would require companies to put the word “imitation” on their plant-based meat products. The bill calls for the products to carry a statement on their packages “that clearly indicates the product is not derived from or does not contain meat.”

Dr. Marshall, an obstetrician, said he introduced the bill after hearing from constituents. Patients of his told him they were confused about the health benefits of plant-based beef substitutes, and beef producers told him they were frustrated that the products are sold in grocery stores next to ground beef. “Kansas has a very large beef industry and they said, ‘Why are we allowing this fake meat in the meat department?’” he said.

Mr. Brown, the chief executive of Impossible Foods, said his company’s mission is not to convince consumers that the Impossible Burger is the most nutritious food they can eat. It is simply to persuade people who want a “cow burger” to eat an Impossible Burger instead.

“The niche that this fills is not the same niche that a kale salad fills,” he said. “If you’re hungry for a burger and you want something that’s better for you and better for the planet that delivers everything you want from a burger, then this is a great product. But if you’re hungry for a salad, eat a salad.”