Tag: evolution

In Our Time: Extremophiles

“Extremophiles” is a bit of a parochial term – this is the name for organisms that live happily in environments that we consider extreme. Too cold, too hot, too acid, too something to support life, in our terms. Studying the lifeforms that disagree with us on what is a good place to live has started a new field of astrobiology and a new appreciation of the possibility of life existing in the wider universe. Discussing this on In Our Time were Monica Grady (Open University), Ian Crawford (Birkbeck University of London) and Nick Lane (University College London).

The study of extremophiles started with the discovery of a rich ecosystem based on extremophiles living at hydrothermal vents in the sea floor near the Galapagos Islands (an amusing coincidence that it’s these islands in particular). The discovery was made by the scientific crew of a submersible called Alvin in 1977, and was a revelation as although extremophiles were known to exist this was the first evidence that there were more than a few outlier species. Previous assumptions about the requirements for life were shaken up by this discovery. The experts emphasised that we (and organisms like us) live in the “extreme” environments when compared to the universe as a whole – we require conditions that generally don’t exist. So the discovery that life could exist in more “usual” conditions meant that it’s more plausible that life might exist somewhere other than on Earth.

The science of astrobiology was started by these discoveries – this is a multidisciplinary field, which the experts positioned as being part of a trend in modern science. The 20th Century was in many ways about increasing specialisation in the sciences, but now there is a move towards seeing the bigger picture with more collaborations between groups with different specialities. Astrobiology is not exobiology – that would be the study of alien lifeforms and we haven’t found any (yet). Instead astrobiology is the search for life elsewhere.

One of the assumptions that was overturned by the extremophiles found by Alvin was that sunlight was critical for life. Knowing that it’s possible for life to cope with no sun* opens up the possibility that life might exist on Jupiter’s moon Europa, for instance. Europa has a hot core (due to the friction generated by the various gravitational forces exerted on it) and an icy shell, with liquid in between. It also probably has hydrothermal vents. It just wouldn’t have sunlight under the shell, but that might not matter after all.

*They did mention in passing later in the programme that parts of the ecosystem at those vents makes use of the oxygen dissolved in the sea, which wouldn’t be there without sunlight (as it’s a by-product of photosynthesis, which uses the sun for energy). So the current population is evolved to handle a post-photosynthesis world. But I think the idea is that if there wasn’t any dissolved oxygen then it’d just be a different ecosystem of extremophiles rather than no ecosystem at all.

Another foundational insight for the field of astrobiology was the work of Carl Woese in the 1970s on developing a Tree of Life based on genetic data. The traditional view of the high level groupings of organisms is five kingdoms: animals, plants, fungi, protists, bacteria. But Woese’s work showed that the real high level division is into 3 kingdoms: bacteria, archaebacteria and eukaryotes. Eukaryotes include all multicellular organisms (plus some single celled ones). Archaebacteria include the extremophiles and were once thought to be just a subset of bacteria – but the genetic data shows that they are as unrelated to bacteria as we are. They also arose first – bacteria and eukaryotes diverged from them later.

Astrobiology is not the same as SETI – the latter is searching for signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, but astrobiologists will be overjoyed to discover a single celled organism existing somewhere other than Earth. The experts spent a bit of time discussing the Drake Equation and how astrobiology fits within that framework. The Drake Equation is an answer (of sorts) to the question of how many extraterrestrial civilisations we might be able to communicate with. I say “of sorts” because, as Bragg pointed out on the programme, the terms of the equation started out as all unknowns. What the equation is useful for is breaking down the question into manageable chunks that can then be investigated. So one term is “how many stars have planets”, and since Drake formulated his equation it’s been found that pretty much all stars have planets – so clearly that’s not a limiting factor. The question that astrobiologists are working on is “how common is life of any sort?” – which is a couple of the terms in the Drake Equation: the average number of planets that are capable of supporting life per star that has planets and the number of these capable planets that actually develop life.

There’s still only one example of a life-bearing planet, so it’s hard to extrapolate much about the origins of life and how common an occurrence it might be. One thing that might have bearing on the problem is that life only arose once on Earth – all organisms share a common ancestor. I did wonder, although they didn’t discuss it, if we can be sure it only arose once – is it possible to disambiguate that from multiple origins only one of which survived? But even if we are sure that it was a one-off event on Earth this may not be because it’s hard to do per se. It might be that once life gets going once it uses up the raw materials that it arose from, preventing subsequent developments of life. This is an idea that goes back even to Darwin although other parts of his “small warm pond” concept of the origin of life are no longer thought plausible.

The origins of life aren’t the only thing that we only have one example of on Earth (with relevance to the Drake Equation). The jump from the simpler cells of archaebacteria and bacteria to the more complex cells of eukaryotes has only occurred once. Multicellular organisms have also only evolved once, ditto intelligence capable of building a technological civilisation. So even if it turns out that there are many planets supporting life of a sort out there in the universe, intelligence may still be very rare or even unique.

Panspermia is another hypothesis about how life got to Earth – or conversely how it may have got/will get to other places. This is the idea that life is spread through the universe via meteors etc, and so life may not’ve originated on Earth. There are several things that suggest that this is possible, even if we don’t know if it actually happened. For instance we do find bits of rocks on Earth that originated on other planets (the Manchester Museum has a small piece of the Moon and a small piece of Mars that got to Earth as meteorites). There are also micro-organisms on Earth that can live within rocks. And we know from experiments done on space missions that some micro-organisms can live through the heat of entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. At this point in the discussion Bragg mentioned Fred Hoyle had been laughed out of the scientific community for proposing something similar many decades ago. Grady pointed out that one reason this sort of theory is looked down is that all it does is shift the question up one level: What’s the origin of life on Earth? Space! What’s the origin of life in space? Dunno. The modern concept of panspermia is also not the same as Hoyle’s – which involved free-floating life seeds travelling over large distances, rather than accidental transfer between planets via meteorite. (This whole section of the discussion made me think of the start of the film Prometheus, which of course is another reason people raise their eyebrows at panspermia – all too often it comes with a side order of “and that’s how the aliens made us”.)

Finding life on other planets is made more difficult because we don’t entirely know what we’re looking for. There was a meteorite discovered in Australia that was thought might have fossil micro-organisms in it that hadn’t originated on Earth. Eventually it was decided that these weren’t the first signs of extraterrestrial life, but it was controversial for a long time. Grady noted that it was easier to figure out in that particular case because it was a rock that had landed on Earth – the task gets much more difficult when another sample means another round trip to Mars. However the only way we’re likely to find out if there’s life elsewhere is by going and looking – whether that’s with robotic explorers or human explorers.

As the Australian meteorite case shows there is a high level of proof required before astrobiologists will be willing to agree that they have found signs of life that are definitely of non-Earth origin. However the experts felt that they (as a field) are getting better at figuring out what to look for. The essential requirements for life are now thought to be water and carbon, but even with those requirements in common with Earth life extraterrestrial life might look very different. The experts emphasised how much chance is involved in evolution – even if you could re-run the history of the Earth it would look completely different despite starting with the same conditions.

This programme felt oddly mis-named – not often the case for In Our Time episodes which generally stay on topic rather well. But this wasn’t really about extremophiles, it was about the search for non-Earth life.

Secrets of Bones; Tales from the Royal Wardrobe

Secrets of Bones was a 6 part series of half hour programmes about skeletons, presented by Ben Garrod. Each episode covered a different aspect of the way that skeletons are vital to vertebrates. The series looked at both the commonalities between the vertebrate skeletal structure, and also the ways that skeletons are adapted to the life style of the particularly organism. For instance when talking about bone structure Garrod highlighted how the mix of mineral and organic material makes bone particularly suited to holding organisms up in general. And he also talked about how bird bones are particularly lightweight as an adaptation for flight.

Garrod was a very enthusiastic presenter, clearly in love with his subject and able to convey that to the viewer. I was also impressed that it didn’t feel dumbed down at all. It was perhaps a little repetitive at times, but given how information dense the short episodes felt it might’ve been necessary to recap at the end just to stop one from getting lost. Worth watching.

Tales from the Royal Wardrobe was another one-off programme about royal history presented by Lucy Worsley. As with Tales from the Royal Bedchamber (post) it was a history of the English (and then British) monarchy from Tudor times forward, this time viewed through the lens of what clothes they wore and how this affected public perceptions of them. And it was a splendid opportunity for Worsley to dress up in a variety of historical outfits! 🙂 She stopped short of dressing up as the Queen or Princess Di, however – but we did get that far towards modernity in the clothes that were discussed.

It was a fun programme, I think I always enjoy watching Worsley’s programmes. I do wonder how many times she can repeat this particular formula before it goes stale, tho – two might be enough.

Other TV watched this last couple of weeks:

Episodes 3 and 4 of Tropic of Cancer – repeat of a series where Simon Reeve travels round the world visiting the countries that the Tropic of Cancer runs through.

Episode 1 of Dolphins – Spy in the Pod – slightly disappointing documentary series about dolphins.

Mud Sweat and Tractors; Fossil Wonderlands: Nature’s Hidden Treasures; The Crusades

Mud Sweat and Tractors is a four part series about the changes in farming in Britain over the last century or so. It split it up into four areas – milk, horticulture, wheat and beef – and treated each as a separate story, so each episode seemed quite self-contained. Each time there were two or three farming families chosen who had photographs and video footage stretching back to the 1930s. So they made good case studies and could talk about why they or their Dad or Grandad had made particular decisions at particular points. And the old videos were good for showing what the actual changes were. As well as this there were several social historians or experts in other parts of the farming/food production process who could talk about the wider trends that the individual farmers & their decisions fitted into.

Separating it out like that worked for telling the individual stories, but I think I might’ve like a bit more explicit drawing together of the themes that affected all the areas of farming. I could work some of them out, it just would’ve been nice to see more discussion of it in the actual programmes. Some of the commonalities were that the Second World War, and the aftermath of it, were a turning point – farming had been in decline before that, but during the war food imports were cut off and so increased production was important. After the war there was concern that Britain shouldn’t return to the pre-war situation, so farmers were given financial incentives to stay farming and to increase food production. And a lot of effort put into scientifically improving the breeds and technology used in farming. And the common theme after that is of food production getting too high – too much that wasn’t being eaten – so the subsidies go and it gets much harder for farmers economically. In addition some of the previous good ideas become seen as not such a good thing – things like the increase in chemicals used in horticulture in the post-war era (like DDT). Or things like breeding beef cattle for larger size & less fatty meat, but then it turns out that doesn’t taste so good so you have to compensate and fatten them up a bit.

It was interesting watching this with J. I grew up in a town so it was just history for me, and someone else’s history if that makes sense. But J grew up in a very rural area, right near farms. For a while his family rented a house on a farm, most of the rest of the time they lived in a 10 house village with working farms around them. So a lot of the 70s and 80s footage included things he remembered seeing as a child. I think we watched one bit of it three or four times in the last episode, because it included a hay baler that was exactly the sort he’d been fascinated by as a little boy. It had a robot arm, and somehow hay went in, was moved around by the arm then came out as square bales. Which was kinda fascinating to watch 🙂

In Fossil Wonderlands: Nature’s Hidden Treasures Richard Fortey visited 3 particularly important and rich fossil beds, and talked about what they’d taught us about the evolution of life. One commonality of the three is that they have fossils with the soft body parts preserved, which means we know so much more about the animals than is generally possible from fossils.

First (and most obvious to me) was the Burgess Shale – a section of the Rockies where early multicellular organisms are well preserved. We’d just seen that on the David Attenborough programme we watched recently (post) so this wasn’t new ground for us. Still nice to see tho, particularly as I remember reading about it when I was a teenager. The second episode took us to China and to some new fossil beds there which are re-writing our ideas of how birds evolved and what the differences between dinosaurs and birds actually are. This is because these recently discovered fossils include several feathered dinosaurs. And the last of the three fossil beds was in Germany, with many fossils from early in the explosion of mammalian diversity after the dinosaurs died out. These well preserved fossils include lots of bats (already looking very sophisticated), early horses, and the earliest known primate fossils.

This was an interesting series 🙂 I’m sure I’ve said before that I wanted to be a palaeontologist when I was in my early teens – until I worked out that it would mean lots of being outside grubbing about in the dirt & rocks! So I particularly like seeing these sorts of programmes, and all the cool stuff that’s been discovered since I was reading so much about it.

We also finished watching a series about The Crusades this week. It was presented by Thomas Asbridge, and I’m pretty sure we’ve seen it before – but not during a period when I was blogging about the TV we watch so I can’t be 100% sure (this is one incentive to keep writing up the programmes we see!). Sadly the reason we’re pretty sure we’ve seen it is because the irritations seemed familiar. Some of that was the style – whenever there was a static image (like a painting from a manuscript) they’d tilt it or pan around on it in a particular irritating fashion. And there was a lot of over dramaticness to the script and the way Asbridge presented it. And for all it was billed as “groundbreaking” I didn’t really have any “wow I didn’t know that/remember that” moments (and I don’t think that’s just because I think I’ve seen it before).

It covered the Crusades in three chunks. First the start, and the initial successes (and their attendant brutalities). Next was Richard the Lionheart vs. Saladin. The final episode looked at the Muslim success in driving out the Christians, and at how it was actually the need to fight the encroaching Mongol Empire that drove this and the effects on the Christian Crusader Kingdoms were more of a side-effect.

Overall it was interesting enough to keep watching, but not as interesting as I’d hoped.

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 1 of How the Wild West Was Won with Ray Mears – a look at how the geography of the USA affected the colonisation and history of the Wild West.

Episode 1 of Secrets of Bones – series about bones, their biology & evolution.

The Necessary War; The Pity of War; David Attenborough’s First Life

The Necessary War and The Pity of War were a pair of programmes from the BBC about the First World War that aired a couple of months ago. In The Necessary War Max Hastings put the case for WW1 being, ultimately, necessary despite the loss of life etc. And in The Pity of War Niall Ferguson argued that it was all a terrible and costly (in terms of lives) mistake – this programme finished with a debate. I found myself not entirely agreeing with either position, although I preferred Hastings’s presentation as Ferguson was more than a touch smug and flippant. Both were looking at this from a very British perspective, the question wasn’t so much “was the War worth it?” as “should Britain have gone to war in 1914?”.

Hastings’s main point was that at the time the decision to go to war was made it seemed the least of all possible evils. He argued that if Britain had stayed out of the war in 1914 then there was a reasonable chance that Germany would’ve overrun France, and then Britain would later have faced war with a much bigger Germany which would be more capable of disrupting British shipping (and thus the British economy and empire). So he suggested that at the time, and with hindsight, war seemed inevitable the only question was “now or later?”. He also discussed how the atrocities perpetrated by the German army as they rolled over Belgium meant that this was the moral choice as well as the politically sensible one and that a Europe dominated by the Kaiser’s Germany would not be a pleasant place to live. I was somewhat less convinced by his attempt to present the Versailles Treaty as a good thing just because it was better than what the German’s would’ve imposed if they’d won (there’s a lot of room between that and “good” after all).

Ferguson on the other hand thought that if Britain had stayed out of the war in 1914 then the world would’ve been a better place both in the short term and in the long run. But I’m afraid he didn’t convince me at all, except that I do agree that with the benefit of hindsight the First World War was an appalling waste of lives and didn’t even produce a lasting peace. His arguments were mostly appeals to emotion and he also used counterfactuals to illustrate what he thought would’ve happened if Britain had stayed out of the war. His key idea was that he thought the conflict would’ve remained European without Britain’s intervention, and that a Germany that had conquered or otherwise overrun France and Belgium wouldn’t have expanded further. There was a strong air of “who cares about the French and Belgians” although he didn’t go as far as to say that – but having recently watched both The Necessary War and the series based on Hew Strachan’s book about WW1 I was struck by his complete lack of mention of the way the Belgian and French civilians were treated by the advancing German army at the beginning of the war. It wouldn’t’ve fit very well with his “playful” suggestion that a Europe “dominated” by the Kaiser’s Germany would’ve been “just like our modern EU” (although he conceded that Angela Merkel is rather nicer than the Kaiser). He didn’t come across as having much more than wishful thinking to back up his idea that peace and harmony would’ve reigned as soon as Germany finished conquering Belgium, breaking the back of France and defanging Russia.

The debate at the end of The Pity of War was both with experts, and with the audience for Ferguson’s lecture (he lectured, Hastings did more of a standard documentary programme). No-one seemed to agree much with Ferguson and he got taken to task for his flippancy about the EU by a rather formidable woman in the audience too 🙂

In the end I think I agree with Hastings that the choice to go to war was the best one that the British leadership could see at the time. And I think without the examples of WW1 and WW2 we wouldn’t all be as wary of global modern warfare – which doesn’t make them good things at all, just sadly inevitable.

David Attenborough’s First Life was a two part series about the origins of animal life on our planet. It goes before his series about the evolution of the vertebrates (which we watched last year), and so only mentioned vertebrates right at the very end. Although it was called “First Life” he really wasn’t interested in anything except animals, and so we didn’t get to see much about the prokaryotes (who were the first life) or even eukaryotes prior to the development of multicellular organisms. And plants were only ever mentioned in passing.

So in episode 1 he covered the evolution of organisms like sponges, and looked at the fossil record of a group of now long extinct animals which had a different body plan to our own. These were all sedentary and had grew by branching with each branch being a smaller version of the whole organism. These died out (Attenborough said “inevitably” but I’m not quite sure why), and the last part of that programme looked at the Cambrian Explosion which is the name given to the sudden rise of diversity of animals with a more familiar body plan. These were generally capable of movement and have head ends and tail ends to their bodies. And even teeth! Episode 2 focussed on arthropods, and in particular the insects and the colonisation of the land. In particular he looked at the way that the development of hard shells to fend off predators lead to being able to leave the water (because their bodies didn’t collapse or dehydrate). And we were shown lots of awesome trilobite fossils from a particularly well preserved fossil bed in Morocco.

Other TV watched last week:

Episode 3 of Churches: How to Read Them – series looking at symbolism and so on in British churches.

Episode 1 of A Very British Murder with Lucy Worsley – series about the popular fascination with murder in late Victorian & Edwardian times.

Episode 1 of Mud, Sweat and Tractors – series about the history of farming in 20th Century Britain.

In Our Time: Photosynthesis

In the end nearly all life on Earth depends on sunlight for its energy source. Heterotrophs like ourselves are a step or two away from the sunlight, but ultimately it’s the process of photosynthesis that fuels our food and thus ourselves. Photosynthesis also, as a byproduct, provides the air we breathe. The three experts who talked about it on In Our Time were Nick Lane (University College London), Sandra Knapp (Natural History Museum) and John Allen (Queen Mary, University of London).

Photosynthesis happens in plants, in structures called chloroplasts inside plant cells. At the botanical level Knapp explained that photosynthesis is the plant taking in CO2 and water, and turning those into oxygen and sugars using the energy from sunlight. After she had set the scene the two biochemists moved on to talk a bit about the molecules involved in making this process work. Lane explained the complexity of the protein complexes that are needed, in terms of their size. On the one had they’re very small – each chloroplast is less than a tenth of a millimetre across, yet they are packed full of thousands of clusters of photosynthetic apparatus. But from another perspective they’re very big – if you were to be shrunk to the size of an oxygen atom then the photosynthetic complexes would look like vast industrial cities.

Chlorophyll is a critical component of the process, it does the actual light harvesting. Allen gave quite a good verbal description of a chlorophyll molecule – first imagine a line of four carbon atoms with a nitrogen at the end, and then imagine this formed into a ring (a pentagon). Then imagine four of those in a line, then form them into a ring with the nitrogens all in the centre. This is the head of the chlorophyll molecule, and in the centre spot sits a magnesium atom which is essential to the process. One of the four rings has a tail which is insoluble in water but soluble in fats, and so it is what anchors the chlorophyll in the chloroplast membrane (which is made up of fats).

There are actually 300 or so chlorophyll molecules involved in each photosynthetic operation. The light is absorbed by one and then an electron is excited and leaves the chlorophyll molecule. This bumps into another and detaches an electron from it, and it bumps around a bit like a ball in a pinball table. Eventually it reaches one special chlorophyll molecules which uses the energy to “crack” a water atom. They didn’t really explain the details of the process (and I have long since forgotten them from the days when I had it memorised!), but from here you either follow a process that ends up with glucose (stored energy) and oxygen (toxic waste) or you use the protons from the water (protons are hydrogen nuclei, so that’s what you get if you break up the water and strip the electron off the hydrogen atom) to generate ATP (the energy currency of all cells).

One of the biochemists (Lane, I think) said that ATP is a bit like the coins you put in a coin operated machine. Any time a cell needs energy to do something it uses ATP to power the process. ATP is made either during photosynthesis, or by a process called respiration that both plants and animals do. In essence both do the same thing, but photosynthesis starts with light and respiration starts with glucose. Both processes build up a proton gradient across a membrane – on one side of the membrane there are lots of protons (generated from the H2O or glucose), on one side there are very few. Movement of these protons through the membrane only occurs in channels created by protein complexes that use the energy of this potential difference to generate ATP.

So that’s, in basic terms, the process. They also talked a bit about why plants are green – which is one of those “that’s a good question, but we’re not sure” moments. In one sense (which Knapp pointed out) chlorophyll is green because that’s the wavelength of light it reflects. But more interesting is why plants aren’t black – surely it would be most efficient to absorb all the light? There is some idea that higher wavelengths of light might damage the plants, so are reflected, but it’s not that simple because they don’t just absorb red light (which would be safest). In this bit of the discussion they also mentioned the nifty reason why rainforest plants tend to have red undersides to their leaves. Not much light makes it down to the leaves of plants that aren’t up in the canopy, so it’s important to get as much as you can out of the light you do get. So the red underside reflects red light back up to the top surface of the leaf for another chance of using the energy from it.

Another subject covered was the evolution of photosynthesis, and how plants acquired the ability. And what effect this had on the planet. Photosynthesis evolved in cyanobacteria, which are single celled organisms. Chloroplasts are actually descendants of these free living organisms, which were absorbed or engulfed by ancestral plant cells. So plants didn’t evolve the ability to photosynthesise themselves, instead they make use of a cell that already had the ability. The evolution of photosynthesis had a huge effect on the planet – using up the CO2 in the atmosphere had a cooling effect, and actually led to an ice age, a snowball earth. Release of O2 was also not good – it is very reactive, and was actually toxic to most organisms at the time. Bragg was fascinated by the idea that something that’s so essential to most life nowadays was once a toxic waste product.

This was a bit of an odd subject for me to write up – I think I’ve mostly covered what they talked about, but I’m very aware that I used to know a lot more about it. I can remember having the photosynthetic pathway memorised (along with the various steps in respiration too), I just can’t remember any of it! So I know the above is simplified, but I no longer know what the details should be. A bit of a weird sensation.

Monkey Planet; Pagans and Pilgrims: Britain’s Holiest Places

Monkey Planet was a three part series presented by George McGavin about primates – monkeys, apes and lemurs. The first episode in was primarily a survey of just how wide-ranging and varied a group the primates are. The other two looked at aspects of primate behaviour that we tend to think of as particularly human, and showed both how it’s actually primate-wide and more varied than our narrow perspective suggests. The second episode concentrated on social interactions – like social hierarchies, family arrangements, maintaining friendships. And the third episode was focussed on intelligence and learning. That had the most startling piece of footage – a chimpanzee who lives in Iowa in a research institute who was shown going on a picnic with one of the scientists and making a campfire and toasting marshmallows on it. It shouldn’t be startling – I know chimpanzees are intelligent and very closely related to humans (we could be considered a third chimpanzee species). But somehow making a fire to toast marshmallows on was more human-ish than I was expecting.

This was a fun series to watch, even if I haven’t written much – its strength was in the footage of all the different primates being primates (which is hard to write about but good to watch).

Another series we finished watching this week was Pagans and Pilgrims: Britain’s Holiest Places. This covered a lot of the same sort of territory as the recent Neil Oliver series, Sacred Wonders of Britain (post) but where the Oliver series organised things chronologically this one organised them thematically. The six half-hour episodes covered things like “Water” or “Caves” and so on. It was based on someone’s book, but not presented by the author. I’m not sure I was all that keen on the actual presenter – Ifor ap Glyn – whose schtick seemed to be that at the start of the episode he tried to come across as completely without knowledge on the subject, then by the end of the half hour he’d “learnt why these places are so important”. And it wasn’t quite believable either at the start or the end. One thing he was very good at, however, was telling the associated stories for places with the right sense of awareness of the ridiculous nature of them!

A bit shallow, but actually did rather well as a contrasting sort of programme to watch after something more weighty (like The First World War).

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 8 of The First World War – a 10 part series covering the whole of the war.

Episodes 1 and 2 of Ian Hislop’s Olden Days – a series about the British fascination with an idealised past.

Episode 1 of How to Get Ahead – series about court life during a three different historical periods.

Episode 1 of Precision: The Measure of All Things – series about measurement and the history of measurement.

Pilgrimage with Simon Reeve; Survivors: Nature’s Indestructible Creatures

Pilgrimage with Simon Reeve was a three part series that was partly a travelogue and partly about the history of Christian pilgrimage across Europe and the Holy Land from medieval times through to the modern day. Reeve made it pretty clear several times that he’s not a Christian himself, so this was an outsider’s view on the subject. He did, however, talk to several people who do pilgrimages for religious purposes today, so we got both sides of the subject represented. The first episode started in Lindisfarne and made its way down to Canterbury and mostly talked about medieval experience of pilgrimage. Then the second episode went through France and Northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela, and then across the alps to Rome. The third episode went from Istanbul to Jerusalem (via Bethlehem).

Reeve seemed focussed primarily on the question of what people get out of pilgrimage. His conclusions were that as well as the visiting of spiritually significant sites the journey itself has spiritual benefits for the people who do pilgrimages. They have a time to step outside of their daily lives and reflect on how they’re living and what they’re doing with their lives. Be that in a religious sense or a purely spiritual sense, various of the modern pilgrims he talked to weren’t people who called themselves Christian.

It wouldn’t be a Simon Reeve programme if it didn’t also look at the less uplifting parts of the subject! In the last episode there he was travelling through the West Bank (as one has to, if one’s visiting Bethlehem), and took the opportunity to contrast the modern political situation with the spiritual significance of the region to so many people. Another example was his visit to a very modern cult centre – the town where Padre Pio lived, who died in 1968. This has a massive new cathedral, a TV station of it’s own (run by monks), lots of fancy hotels in the town for all the touristspilgrims. And various rumours of how he kept his stigmata open during life by the judicious application of carbolic acid … He was canonised, but Reeve implied that was more an attempt by the Vatican to keep it in house so’s to speak. The cult was growing up anyway, so he was officially made a saint.

An interesting series 🙂 And in a piece of serendipity the first episode overlapped in subject matter with the end of Neil Oliver’s recent series about Sacred Wonders of Britain that we’d just finished watching (post). The second episode had some overlap with the second episode of Waldemar Januszczak’s series about Baroque art which we’re also watching at the moment. The three presenters have very different styles so it was interesting to get the various perspectives all so quickly together!

The other series we finished watching this week was Survivors: Nature’s Indestructible Creatures – a three part series about species that didn’t die out in mass extinction events presented by Richard Fortey. Each episode covered a different extinction event, and Fortey tracked down 10 species that survived it through to modern times. The first one was about the Great Dying (which occurred 252 million years ago) which is the most significant extinction even with the greatest die-off of species. For this one he looked at things like horseshoe crabs, sea cucumbers and lampreys. The second covered the KT boundary – i.e. death of the dinosaurs, so had an emphasis on birds, mammals and crocodiles. And the third one looked at the Ice Age and at the cold adapted species that made it through to our own times.

This was definitely more my sort of thing than J’s. I thought it managed to combine a bit of geology, a bit of evolutionary biology and a bit of modern day travelogue into an interesting whole (even tho I think I knew of most of it before, it’s nice to actually see things sometimes). Fortey was an engaging presenter, who was also pretty entertaining as he tried to handle live specimens with varying degrees of success and comfort. I had a great deal of sympathy with that as someone who’s significantly worse at handling live animals than he was yet is still a biologist 🙂 Oh, and it also had a running theme of Fortey eating some of these survivors & telling us how they taste, which was a slightly odd (but fun) addition.

Other TV watched this week:

The Coffee Trail with Simon Reeve – one-off programme about coffee growing in Vietnam. Vietnam is the main supplier of coffee for the instant coffee trade, and it’s as exploitative a trade as you’d expect. The regime in Vietnam isn’t particularly nice either.

Episode 2 of Baroque! From St Peter’s to St Paul’s – gloriously over the top series about Baroque art and architecture, presented by Waldemar Januszczak.

Episode 1 of The Stuarts – a series about the Stuart Kings of England & Scotland, presented by Clare Jackson, and about how they shaped the United Kingdom and how they were shaped by it. Broadcast on the Scottish version of BBC2 only.

Nigel Slater’s Great British Biscuit – a similar programme to Slater’s previous one on sweets (post), part nostalgia, part history of biscuits. Lots of “oh I remember those” moments 🙂

Greek Myths: Tales of Travelling Heroes – programme presented by Robin Lane Fox about the early Greek myths about the origins of their gods. Also looking at the links between the mythological stories and the landscape the Greeks knew, and also the links to Hittite mythology. We both had quite a lot of deja vu watching it, and figured out eventually that we’d watched it before about 3 years ago and had just forgotten (brief post on my livejournal). Interesting & worth watching, even for a second time 🙂

Treasures of Ancient Egypt (Ep 2); Strange Days: Cold War Britain; Rise of the Continents

The second episode of Alastair Sooke’s series about the art of Ancient Egypt covered the Middle Kingdom (briefly) and most of the New Kingdom. He only picked a couple of objects from the Middle Kingdom – both from Senusret III’s reign. He gave the impression that this is because the New Kingdom was the Golden Age, which is true in some ways, but the Egyptians themselves looked back at the Middle Kingdom as their “classical age” where art and culture first achieved great heights. I think it’s a shame he didn’t make it more clear the reason it gets short-shrift in programmes like these is because not as much survives for one reason or another. Often because sites were re-used or updated by New Kingdom Egyptians wanting the association with past glories.

The other eight treasures on the programme were from the New Kingdom between the reigns of Hatshepsut and Tutankhamun. As well as looking at some of the iconic art from her reign he spent some time talking about the iconography of Hatshepsut as Pharaoh. Pharaohs are male, so Hatshepsut was represented with all the male accoutrements and a masculine body in her official art works. One thing I hadn’t realised before (or had forgotten) is that it was during Hatshepsut’s time that the term Pharaoh actually started to be used – it translates to “the palace” so it’s the equivalent of talking about the White House doing X or Y in the USA (and surprisingly the example Sooke used was Brits talking about the Crown which I don’t even think is the best of the possible UK equivalents – No. 10 would be better).

There was obviously some considerable discussion of the new art style that Akhenaten brought with him when he changed the state religion. Both in terms of the slightly bizarre body shapes of the earliest stuff, and the new informal poses and domestic scenes on official art works. Which does give a very different impression of the royal family of that time, even as I remind myself it’s propaganda first & foremost. Obviously the bust of Nefertiti featured in this section, you can’t really miss it out. But the item from around that era (just before it) that struck me most was the little glass fish, that’s now in Berlin. I’ve seen it before & it’s a lovely piece, but what made it the highlight of this programme for me was that they showed us how it was made. I’ve read about how these glass objects were made before but it’s different actually watching it happen. And as always I’m somewhat in awe of what people were able to do before the advent of modern technology.

Obviously the programme ended with Tutankhamun’s mask – another iconic piece you can’t miss out, which also illustrates how what we have to admire depends so much on chance. The next episode covers the rest of Egyptian culture up to Cleopatra, quite a wide range. There’ve been a few clips of the temple at Abu Simbel, so presumably that’ll feature 🙂

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This week we finished watching Dominic Sandbrook’s series about the Cold War – Strange Days: Cold War Britain. This three part series looked at British history from 1946 through to 1989 through the lens of how the Cold War affected politics and culture. So part of the series was Sandbrook telling us about the major events of the Cold War, and giving some indication what life was like on the other side, to give us context for the effects on Britain. And the other part was looking at events in Britain from a perspective we don’t always think of. Some stuff was obvious when you thought about it – like the popularity of James Bond films tying in to revelations about Russian spies in the UK. And the John le Carré novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold as the much less glamorous and more cynical take on the same thing. Other things less so – consumerism being a part of how we differentiated “us” from “them” makes sense when I think about it, but I’d never’ve thought of how capitalism was in some ways kept in check by a desire to prove it was better than the alternatives. Which made more sense when Sandbrook talked about it than I have quite managed to articulate here!

The threat of nuclear war and how that shaped our culture was one of the strands running through the programmes, and the various attempts government made to prepare people for this. Sandbrook highlighted several times the contrast between the almost optimistic government handbooks which aimed not to panic people (even if this backfired at times) and the bleak films and TV serieses which were closer to what the reality might be. He showed us clips from The War Game (a 60s film that wasn’t shown on TV for about 20 years) which was a meticulously researched documentary, and Threads (an 80s film) which was more overtly fictional. Both grim enough even in excerpt that I know I don’t want to watch them in full. In the third programme Sandbrook also mentioned a book he’d read for class when he was 10 (I looked him up on wikipedia, he’s a couple of months younger than me) – as he started to talk about it I knew exactly which book he meant before the reveal. It was “Brother in the Land” by Robert Swindells, which I’ve read. Once. I’ve dipped into it occasionally since, and it’s still on my shelves, because I remember it as a good, well written book. But I’ve never re-read it cover to cover, despite my love of post-apocalypic novels. It’s just an extremely grim and depressing and unrelentingly bleak tale of the first months after a nuclear war. I read it at about 13 or 14, a few years after it was published, and it’s stuck with me since then – it must’ve been pretty traumatising to read at the age of 10 particularly when you had to think about it for school rather than stick your head in the sand (I’ve always adopted the ostrich approach to the idea of The End of the World As We Know It catastrophes).

Anyway, that was a bit of a digression. I liked this series, in particular I thought they did a good job of mixing archival footage with new stuff seamlessly switching between the two in a way that made the old stuff seem more immediately relevant. I even liked the somewhat overblown style, but I think J found the sweeping generalised claims made at times a little irritating.

We also finished another series this week – Rise of the Continents – which I really enjoyed so I wanted to say a few words about it even though this post is already quite long! This was a series about plate tectonics and the geological history of the earth, presented by Iain Stewart. Each week Stewart looked at a different continent (Africa, Australia, the Americas and Eurasia) and followed the geological story of the continent after it split from Pangea (the supercontinent that existed when the dinosaurs roamed the earth). He showed us the evidence that tells us about this geological story, and he also showed the impact that geology has had on both evolution and on human history. He’s a geologist so was strongest on that subject, pretty good on palaeontology but said a couple of dubious historical things we noticed (but otherwise was OK on that). Basically what you’d expect as he got further from his actual area of expertise. He was also a charmingly enthusiastic presenter.

One reason I enjoyed it so much is because I think the idea of plate tectonics is inherently cool. The earth not being static but consisting of vast sheets of crust all moving around and crashing into each other is awesome. It’s also an area I don’t know much about – I think the last time I read a book on it was in the 80s, when the science was still fairly new. So there were all sorts of things I didn’t know, and most of them were in the “neat facts” category. Like did you know that as India travelled on its way to crashing into Eurasia it moved over a magma plume, which turned a big chunk of it into a zone of volcanoes. This thinned the land so India started to move quicker. But also while it sat over this region for a few hundred thousand years the amount of volcanic eruption dumped toxins in the oceans and changed the climate – so this is thought to have contributed to the decline of the dinosaurs (before an asteroid finished them off). Or did you know the silver mines in South America exist because of subduction of the Pacific Ocean floor carries water down under the land. I can’t quite remember how Stewart said this then lead to the silver deposits, but the very idea of water being carried down under the crust is one I’d not thought of before (and it’s kinda cool as a concept).

I think J didn’t like the visual effects on the programme much – there were quite a few transitions where they used a jumble of still shots and mixed up audio before Stewart explained something. It didn’t bother me as much though.

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 2 of Sacred Wonders of Britain – Neil Oliver visits several sacred sites in Britain dating from prehistoric times through to the Reformation.

Episode 2 of The Brain: A Secret History – Michael Mosley series about brains, minds and experimental psychology. We never managed to record episode 1 but we decided to watch the other two anyway.

Episode 6 of Tudor Monastery Farm – part re-enactment, part documentary about what life would be like living on and running a farm in 1500.

TV This Week Including Congo, Evolution and Egyptian Mummies

Dan Snow’s History of Congo

This programme falls into the category of incredibly depressing stories about the state of the world. Dan Snow visits Congo and tells us about the history of this region of Africa – and how it’s been screwed over first by European colonial powers and subsequently by homegrown dictators & rebels (propped up by the West). Congo has vast reserves of natural resources, yet the people who’ve been in power over the last hundred and fifty years have all been very good at making the profits disappear into private hands, leaving the country one of the poorest in the world. Also depressing is how little I knew about the country before I watched this programme. Worth watching.

Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life

This programme was part a biography of Darwin, part a trip down memory lane for David Attenborough and part a discussion of his theory of evolution by natural selection. Rather surreally it was presented by current David Attenborough and co-presented by David Attenborough from 30 or so years ago. I mean that they re-used footage from earlier serieses of his, including Life on Earth (which I don’t actually remember watching as a child, but I remember getting the book out of the library multiple times). It ended up feeling like a programme which had a strict budget – not just the re-used old footage, but also an animation of the tree of life which had been made by someone else. There wasn’t really anything new to me in the programme, but it was a pretty good round up of the subject.

Tutankhamun: The Mystery of the Burnt Mummy

This programme was a cut down version of the two hour film that Chris Naunton made about Tutankhamun’s death, which we watched a couple of months ago while visiting J’s parents. I think this one hour version was actually a bit more coherent than the longer film – and it definitely had less of Naunton pretending not to know things so he could ask people leading questions. (Yes, I know that’s part of how you write the script for one of these, but it doesn’t mean I like it much when it’s obvious.) The programme looks at the mummy of Tutankhamun and presents a theory about his death and mummification to explain the physical evidence. As I said the last time I wrote about this programme “determining” the cause of death of Tutankhamun is always an exercise in deciding which wounds you think are real and which you think are artifacts of the mummification process and subsequent treatment of the mummy. Naunton & co’s theory was based around the significant damage in a straight line from Tutankhamun’s left shoulder to left hip, and the missing heart and sternum. They used modern crash simulation technology to show that a chariot crashing into a kneeling Tutankhamun would produce injuries consistent with those on the mummy – and suggest it’s possible this happened during a battle. But I’m pretty sure other egyptologists think those wounds are a red herring – there are also candidate wounds in one of his legs, for instance.

The more convincing theory they propose is the one that explains why the mummy is charred (hence the title of this incarnation of the programme). The basic idea is that the mummification of Tutankhamun was rushed and the oils used as part of the ritual weren’t allowed to dry out enough before he was wrapped up and put in his coffin. They suggest this would be down to the political situation at the time – Tutankhamun’s named successor was Horemheb, but his actual successor was Ay so there’s a suggestion that Ay seized power and buried Tutankhamun as quickly as possible (and they also suggest he was interred in Ay’s tomb, with Ay later being buried in a bigger tomb originally intended for Tutankhamun). But anyway, he was buried a bit too quickly, still damp from the oils – and some oils as they dry heat up. In particular linseed oil which Naunton did a test with and showed that oily rags bundled up as if they were in a mummy will very quickly reach over 300°C – sadly he didn’t say if linseed oil was one of the oils used in mummification, but I assume something similar is. So it is very likely that Tutankhamun smouldered away in his coffin after burial, and that this explains the charred appearance of the mummy.

This Week’s TV Including Dogs, Evolution of Mammals, Greek Drama, Indian Railways, Roman Britain & the 20th Century

The Wonder of Dogs

The last episode of the dogs series was about dog personalities & dogs as pets. It made the point that although breeds have tendencies towards personality traits each dog is an individual. And that the first few weeks/months of a dog’s life are critical for enabling it to bond with people. They also talked about how it’s not that particular breeds are particularly prone to attacking people, but more the differences in what the dog does if it is badly trained/badly behaved – a labrador will tend to bite hands & arms and to bite & release. That’s much more survivable than the way a pit bull will go for face & neck and bite & hold on. So pit bulls have a reputation for being vicious when the average pit bull isn’t – the badly trained ones cause more problems tho.

They talked about the top 10 breeds kept as pets in the UK, and what about dogs makes them such good pets. Which basically boils down to the fact that we’ve bred them into forming close bonds with their owners. They showed us the classic owner-leaves-the-room experiments where the dog is visibly concerned until their person comes back. There was also demonstration of the fact that dogs generally want to comfort people – a researcher who hadn’t met the dogs before was faking crying, and each dog they tested went over to her to try & lick her face & cheer her up.

It was a good series, although I think it’s a little unfair that dogs got a three part series & cats got a programme & a half on Horizon for a similar thing! 😉

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David Attenborough’s Rise of the Animals: Triumph of the Vertebrates

The second & last part of the recent David Attenborough series about evolution of the vertebrates concentrated on the mammals. As with the first episode I have reservations about the language used – too much of a sense of purpose & direction to what’s a much more random process than was implied. However it was still a neat programme – I liked the mix of CGI and fossils. In particular the shrew-like early mammal skull that they showed turning into a little skeleton walking around on David Attenborough’s fingers. This episode had fewer surprises for me than the previous one – it name checked all the critical mammalian features (fur, warm-blooded, live young, milk) and took in the monotremes & marsupials on the way to placental mammals and eventually apes & humans.

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Ancient Greece: The Greatest Show on Earth

The second part of Michael Scott’s series about Greek drama & Greek history talk about how when democracy & Athenian supremacy wobbled drama managed to broaden its appeal & go from strength to strength. One of the changes was the rise to prominence of actors, and the restaging of old plays – when drama first started it was the playwright who was the only named individual involved (in terms of records that come down to us) and the plays performed were the new ones for the festival that year. But over the 4th Century BC there begin to be awards for actors at the festival, and often the old classics are staged after the new plays. And this is really why we have copies of the surviving plays – the old classics were copied out many times, and so managed to survive intact.

Comedy also shifted in form – at the start of the period they were bawdy and pointedly aimed at current personages & situations whilst being nominally about myths. Whereas by the end of the period the bawdiness was toned down (no more strap on phalluses, as Scott put it) and the tone had shifted to being about ordinary people and stock character types. Much closer to modern comedy, in fact. This was part of how drama’s appeal was broadening as Athens and its democracy ceased to be the centre of the Greek world. Drama was becoming entertainment rather than a part of the political process. And that increased popularity across the Greek world meant that when the Macedonians (under first Philip & then Alexander) were taking over much of the known world they also spread theatres and drama throughout the empire.

The next part promises to be about the Romans, and their reaction to/inheritance of Greek drama.

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John Sergeant on Tracks of Empire

This is a two part series about the railways in India. The premise is that John Sergeant travels the length and breadth of India on the train, and talks about the history both of the railroad and of India during and post British Empire. In this episode he travelled from Calcutta west & north-west towards the Pakistan border. Along the way he talked about the railway towns that grew up to house the men who worked on the railway. He met some of the modern day railworkers, who are devoted to the job of keeping the network running – regarding it as a vital service to their country. He also talked about modern disruption to the rail network by violent protests (blowing up bits of track etc) and about past violence. This included visiting a house besieged during the “Indian Mutiny”. He’s more pro-Empire than is currently fashionable, and this segment made me wince a bit because he was playing up the clueless Englishman abroad thing with “but don’t you think the British soldiers were heroic” while talking to a group of Indians who regarded the leader of the siege as the true hero – the start of the fight for independence. And I felt it came across as a bit patronising, particularly in the context of “paternalistic” attitudes from the British Empire back in its heyday.

The programme finished at the India/Pakistan border. He talked to some people who’d lived through the appalling violence after the partition of India post-independence, which was particularly disturbing to watch. And the next & last segment was filmed at the border itself – the two armies in their fancy uniforms prancing around like something out of a Monty Python sketch, while citizens of each country chanted encouragement like they were at a football match. For all it was funny to see, it was sobering too – keeping the tribalism going and the wounds open.

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Stories from the Dark Earth: Meet the Ancestors Revisited

The premise of this series is Julian Richards revisiting the finds from some archaeological digs he’d been part of over a decade ago – ones that were filmed as part of a series called Meet the Ancestors. The episodes are interspersing the original footage with new work that’s been done on the finds. The first episode was about two Roman burials dating from the 4th Century AD. He’d been discovered in a lead coffin, and was buried in a way that showed he had (or his family had) pagan beliefs. More recent analysis of his teeth has shown that he was definitely a local man. A survey off all the Roman era bodies that’ve been found in Winchester showed that about 30% of them weren’t local – and who was who didn’t always match the theories that had been based on grave goods. Then, as now, some immigrants assimilated and some families kept their “home” traditions generations after they arrived.

The second burial was of a high status woman found in a lead coffin & stone sarcophagus in Spitalfields, London. We’d actually seen the coffin etc in the London Museum when we visited earlier this year, so kinda neat to see that (and a reminder I’ve not yet sorted out my photos from that trip!). When discovered she’d been thought to be Christian, but more recently it’s been suggested she was a member of a mystery cult possibly dedicated to Bacchus. Very recently analysis of her teeth has shown she grew up in Rome itself – which makes her the first (only?) Rome born Roman to be found buried in Britain. Quite exciting, and Richards was speculating that perhaps she was involved with bringing the cult of Bacchus to Britain.

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A Hundred Years of Us

This series was originally aired in 2011 just after the census, and it’s a retrospective of how life has changed over the last hundred years. The format is Michael Aspell in a studio talking to guests, interspersed with bits of video about various topics. The primary guest in the first episode was Pete Waterman, which I initially rolled my eyes at, but he was actually pretty interesting. They also have a family of four generations, the eldest of which have been on every census back to the 1911 one – and so we got some reminiscences of WWI and the 20s & 30s in this episode. The programme started by talking about the 11 plus – using a pair of twins as examples of how passing or failing could change your life. There was also a segment about food and how that’s changed – in particular the influx of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent and our national love affair with curry. Somebody (Phil Tufnell? who wikipedia tells me is a cricketer) went down a mine to see how coal mining was done in the early 20th Century – backbreaking labour, and the 75 year old man who had worked in mining since he was 13 was not impressed by the ability of this “young” man 😉 Oh, and a bit about tea, and how we love to drink it.

It’s a pretty fluffy programme but it is entertaining, we’re going to finish watching the series.

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