The infinite extent of life

I am on a vacation at Rockport-Fulton, on the Gulf Coast in Texas. It is a charming fishing village where I seek sanctuary. I have been coming here for years. Here I find peace. I book a cottage at the Pelican Bay Resort and hang out and spend hours every day in Vipassana meditation, and leave the cares of life behind. In the evenings I hang out on the fishing pier and look at the calm and serene bulk of the Gulf of Mexico. It has a wide sweep, and it is serene in its bulk, and it is quiet even in tide. In its quietness I find quiet. I watch the jelly fish floating in the water, and I look at Scorpio hanging in the sky, with the Red Giant Antares glowing brilliantly. The constellations and the calm space of ocean are comforting. They take us back to our ancestors. For our forefathers were here too, seeing all that I now see.

The best thing about being with fishermen and fisherwomen is that they are quiet, they hate noise, and they do not want to make conversation. They look indifferently at this crazy Indian who meditates for hours on end. I alternate sitting meditation with walking meditation. And when I walk, I walk very slowly, taking one step every two minutes. It takes me over an hour to walk the hundred foot fishing pier, and I repeat it for eight hours. I must look like a madman. But they do not care. I could be a crazy alien with tentacles, but as long as I do not make noise, they are content to let me be. Texas has more depth to it, and Texans accept more readily, than is recognized. Here, in Texas, you can be a madman. We have plenty of them.

From our loins sprang George W. Bush, brazen and brash. He leaped into the world, a veritable Pantagruel, blowing off his placenta. Born after a protracted pregnancy that lasted several years, his ontogeny was complete at birth. He was half the man that he should be, with less than half of its normal intelligence. And we suffered him, and we accepted, indulged, and nourished him. We fed him from our breast. To the nipples of Texas he hung, clamped to her ample breast, feeding steadily until he attained gargantuan proportions. He suckled into early adulthood, until he attained his right to vote. And when his weary mother weaned him, exhausted, with her tits sagging to her knees, he bounded forth to conquer the world, a restless beast in search of his destiny. Yes, Texas is a forgiving mother. She is all accepting, and ever giving. It is in Texas that I have truly learned to understand biological processes. In her arms I am humble. In the ample space that she affords, my mind wanders, to wonder on all that is beautiful about nature. And in her mysterious workings I see vast time scales, immeasurably greater than my life span. These are time scales that stagger the mind.

I sit out on the porch of my cottage late at night, surrounded by Live Oaks (Quercus virginiana). On Live Oaks alone can I write paeans. These beautiful trees, gnarled and twisting, are a delight to see. They are the characteristic signature of Texas. Day or night, in sunlight or in silhouette, they are a wonder of nature. All things are a wonder, but Live Oaks signify the flora of Texas, and Texas is a land that I love. But tonight I am paying attention to sounds. I hear the call of the Cliff Chirping Frog (Eleutherodactylus (Syrrhophus) marnockii) which is an old friend. He is rather erratic in his calls, but what is fascinating is that he can also run and not just hop! Odd indeed! Frogs call in an oscillatory fashion, and I think to myself that this frog is worth studying for its erratic motor behavior and its erratic calling behavior. When does it switch from hop to run, and under what sensory stimulation? Why does it chirp like an insect? Maybe, one day I will study it, if I have time.

I see a movement near me, and I see a male Gulf Coast Toad (Bufo valliceps) next to my chair. “Hop it!” I tell him, but he won’t move. And so I pick him up and he sits in my palm, not afraid at all. He shuffles his feet a little, carefully tucking them under his body, and he sits still hoping that I will not find him interesting enough to eat. A toad is the canonical definition of the word ugly. Our literature and lore speaks of it. I looked at his warty body, his stillness, his instinct for self-preservation, and I thought that I was looking at the most beautiful of all life forms. I love B. valliceps. I think he is a most elegant and beautiful creature, warts and all. And I have studied him. So I look at him and tell him “I wrote a paper on you, aren’t you going to thank me?” I love nature and the endless questions that it raises. How often can we pick up a toad in our yard, look at it with satisfaction, and inform it rather grandly that we have written a paper on it? I have (Jones & Ratnam, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 126, 2009). There is a certain pleasure in it. I dropped him off in the flower bed, and he just sat. Toads sit, and sometimes toads hop. Mostly they sit.

Today I am fascinated by the Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus). You can usually hear them calling in isolation. They are loud and rather mournful, but charming. Tonight I hear three of them calling back and forth. I am astonished. I did not know that they called antiphonally (in alternation). It seemed as if they were signaling to one another. What are these signals? Why for? And to what purpose? I do not know.

From these observations came a mournful regret. I wrote a paper on one solitary species of toads, and I will perhaps write papers on a few other species. How many billions of species are there about which I will never say a word? And other than the living, how many things are there about which I can never know anything, and say nothing? It is infinite, and regrettably my life is finite. I am close to fifty, and I have perhaps a few more decades before dementia and oxidative stress overcome me. And then I will die. But there is so much to investigate and know. Everything in life is interesting. Everything in life is low-hanging fruit. Time will not let me pluck each and every one. The pleasure to examine the texture of each, their smell or their taste is not mine. Mortality is cruel because it takes away my desire to know. It cuts me down at a time when I am just beginning to appreciate and understand nature. And there is so much to know about nature and matter. For, nature is infinite in its extent, but it requires an infinity of lifetimes to know and understand. This is our eternal regret as humans. As awake and enquiring creatures, we have so much to know, and so little time.

The Great Horned Owl calls for a mate. It is territorial in nature because it is a fierce predator. But having established its territory why does it respond to the call of another owl? Is it signaling its territorial domain? Or is it signaling to attract a female? Antiphonal calling is found in frogs as well. They will call in alternation, to attract females, and avoid jamming with neighbors. Mate attraction and maintenance of territory, to raise our young, is the blueprint of life. It is so intimately tied to evolution and sexual selection that it runs as a steady thread across the taxa, and this is due to selection pressure. We humans have not forgotten our ancestral voice, our genetic origins, nor have we forgotten our ascent from slime. We do it too. And associated with it are complex behaviors.

We think frogs are stupid compared to higher vertebrates, likes mammals. Perhaps, but it is a fallacy. We should not be looking at physiological function as an absolute. Rather, we should be looking at the ecological niche that each species fits into. From this viewpoint, evolution has placed all species on equal footing. Each species is superbly designed and adapted to perform its function in its ecological niche. From this viewpoint, no species is any more smart or stupid than any other. Male frogs have one purpose alone. They aggregate to form a chorus, competing with one another by adjusting their calling behavior to successfully attract a female. Their sperm is of great value, and they have to work hard to attract a female so that their sperm counts, and results in fertilization.

When I try to tease apart the alternating calling patterns of frogs in a chorus, I see selection pressure at work. The proximate cause of evolution can be found in the calling behaviors of males, in their intricate timing to attract a mate. This is highly evolved. It is an audio-motor problem, A male hears other males calling (the auditory component) and then it adjusts the timing of its call oscillator in the brain to put out its own call (the motor component), all the while maximizing its chance of attracting a female. What is this link in the brain? How is this dynamic adjustment between listening and calling achieved? We do not know.

From these proximate causes do the ultimate causes of evolution spring. Generations after generations have refined the audio-motor dynamics so that a fit male frog gets it right, and a female selects him. Her selection of a mate bridges the link between the proximate and ultimate causes. Determining this link is one of the hard problems in biology. We simply do not have the time, on an evolutionary scale to understand it. We never see the process of evolution working in a single human lifetime, at least not in vertebrates.

So, this brings me back to the finite number of things that we can do in a lifetime. The number is small, and indeed the time is limited. I envy cosmologists. Like evolutionary biologists cosmologists look into the evolution of the universe. Neither the evolutionary nor the cosmological problems are easy. But there is one factor that makes the life of the cosmologist easier. It is the fundamental limit placed by the speed of light. This limit allows us to calibrate the velocity of the arrow of time. If you take a look at the remarkable Deep Space images from the Hubble Telescope, you will know what I mean. These images provide us information that stretch back billions of years to a time that is close to the Big Bang. Slowly and steadily cosmologists are munching their way towards understanding the evolution of the universe. Biologists are not so lucky. All they have are fossils. But fossils do not provide information about soft tissue (parenchyma), and it is soft tissue that will allow us to get a handle on the proximate causes of evolution.

A working biologist stops and stares, and observes phenomena. In each and every problem encountered in ecology, ethology, evolution, or neurobiology, the biologist has plenty of material to go on, but very little history. There is a cliché to the effect that if we do not understand history, then we are condemned to repeat it (Santayana). I would like to add that if we do not understand history, then we are condemned to never understanding life. So, in our lifetimes we construct theories. Darwin’s is perhaps the best, but to live in the shadow of Darwin would be unwise. He pointed the way forward and it is up to us to take it further. How much further we can take biological theories in an individual lifetime, is a question that I always confront. On B. valliceps alone, a fairly common toad, I can spend a decade or more in teasing apart his calling behavior. But at the end of it I will understand nothing more than his calling behavior. I will not understand his physiology as an integrated, functioning, and whole organism. I will not understand him as a toad.

Is a complete understanding of life possible? Let us take a million biologists, toiling for a million years, can they produce the blueprint of life? In mathematics there are two forms of infinity. One is “countable infinity” such as when counting off the integers. The other is the “uncountable infinity” as defined by the continuum of the real number system. The number of biological problems form a countable infinity, but the understanding of integrative and organismal biological functioning is too packed, too close to be discrete and countable. It is uncountably infinite. Organismal physiology will not be understood no matter how big an army of scientists we assemble, nor the time and resources we expend on the effort. Biological organisms are much too complex. They are organized at multiple levels. To take a simpler example, much has been studied about water, a simple molecule. But there is no theory as yet that can take the molecular structure of water and predict that it will look like the water that we know and see. One that can turn to steam and one that can turn to ice. If we cannot understand water, how much further do we have to go to understand life? A good bit I would think.

This is not an excuse for a horse to sit down in the middle of the race and simply give up. Biologists toil onwards and we are slowly putting together the pieces. They are still tiny patches of a vast tapestry, and there is work to do. I do it happily. My only regret is that my time is finite. Like a child hopping up and down in excitement when visiting a zoo, I too hop up and down every time I step outside my door. From the Live Oak to the Cliff Chirping frog to the Gulf Coast toad to the Great Horned Owl, I have only questions. And then on to the wildflower and the songbird, I find more questions. I am filled with wonder and excitement. I wish to know it all. And I regret that I am a mortal man, for I thirst for completeness of knowledge and seek complete understanding. I want to know everything, nothing spared. The lack of time is my curse. This inability to investigate forever, my everlasting regret.

This time that I have is adequate to live happily in most ways. But it is insignificant compared to the infinite extent of life. Like Faust, I would happily sell my soul to the devil, just to know the infinite. This sin would be less than original.

Under a Texan Sun: The Texas Hill Country

There is a belief that you cannot survive without air-conditioning in Texas, certainly not in San Antonio, a city that lies largely in the South Texas Plains. I say largely because San Antonio also borders the Texas Hill Country and the Blackland Prairies. It sits at the intersection of three different ecosystems. I loathe air-conditioning and central heating, and I simply throw open my balcony door, summer or winter, open all the windows, and let myself boil or freeze. And it is not bad at all, because I can listen to the sounds of Texas. I can hear young people splashing about in the nearby swimming pool, I can hear laughter, and I can hear songbirds. I can hear the katydids, cicadas, crickets, and I can hear frogs. Being a bioacoustician I like bioacoustical sounds.

I live on the edge of the Texas Hill Country. It is a few miles from the University of Texas campus where I work, and where the South Texas Plains begin. A long expanse of arid scrubland and brush, that stretches on for more than a hundred miles to the South Texas coast. It is horse and cattle country, and it evokes the romantic stories of cowpokes wandering the trails rounding cattle, as told by Louis L’Amour. You hear the names of places, like Hondo and Bandera and Matagorda, and it evokes images from the past. It evokes images of Mexicans, Spaniards, White Americans, and Native Americans. They all lived here, fought one another, and still live here. They now live peacefully, or at least, I think so and hope so. Along with Biggles and his Sopwith Camel, the Sackett brothers of L’Amour were my childhood favorites when I lived in India and Sri Lanka.

I devoured L’Amour’s books when I was ten years old, and those of Zane Grey, J. T. Edson, and Oliver Strange. Of all the things that I knew about America then, I knew about Texas the best. I pored over an atlas and picked all the towns in the Wild West and marked them with little crosses. These places I had visited. I lived here in my mind, and I was crazy about cowboys. I had driven unruly longhorn cattle through these one-horse towns onwards to St. Louis on the Mississippi. I drank a lot of yeller likker in cheap saloons, I cussed a lot, and I got into fist fights. I frequented prostitutes. I hung about waiting for my little brother, and I would pounce on him and hurl him to the floor because he was a rustler, a despicable horse and cattle thief. I threatened to shoot him or hang him, or both. I never succeeded because he called mum and she would stop me.

I wanted to be a cowboy. I wanted to wear that hat, leather chaps, and spurs. I wanted to nonchalantly whip out my Colt revolver and shoot something, anything. I wanted to be the fastest gun in the West, a cigarette dangling from my lips. I wanted to eat beef jerky. It didn’t matter that I was a vegetarian and the smell of meat made me retch, I wanted to chew on it like other wandering cowboys. I wanted to sit around a campfire under the open skies, drinking coffee from an enamel mug, and I wanted to smell of sweat, leather, and horse manure. I wanted it bad.

No one said it better than Stan Jones in Ghost Riders in the Sky, as popularized by Johnny Cash. I wanted to ride the cattle trail “trying to catch the devil’s herd, across these endless skies.” It is a romantic song, depicting a romantic country, wide open and beautiful. Texas is beautiful country. Arid, sometimes harsh, it catches your imagination and it catches your heart. It makes you want to saddle a horse and ride in all directions. You just have to be careful that you don’t wander into someone’s land. Texans are fiercely protective of their property. There are few commons in Texas, other than those found in national, state, and city refuges. And of these, there are not too many.

Nearly sixty million years ago, I would probably be living under water. The Gulf Coast as we know it now, swept inland North of San Antonio up to Boerne perhaps. Giant dinosaurs stomped about on the ancient coastline, leaving their footprints on algae mats, now petrified. They are still there and come up every now and then when a flash-flood exposes the underlying rock. The limestone cliffs that form the Balcones Escarpment are shelves of rock, remnants of oceanic cliffs and the old continental shelf. They resemble balconies, hence the name. They form the Northern reaches of San Antonio along Highway 1604. From here on, northwards, the Hill Country begins. A series of rolling hills blanketed with junipers and oaks. Rain comes now and then, in the form of spectacular thundershowers, creating flash floods. Sunlit hills, flashing green, stretching to the endless horizon, are now a smoky blue-gray as the clouds sweep over, and the horizon approaches opaque, in a sweeping wall of water. The thunder rolls over the hills, it rolls across the endless skies.

I have seen it so often. Driving up from the city towards home, I see a clear line demarcating clouds hanging over the Hill Country, leaving the plains and the rest of the city untouched under a sunlit sky. It is a brooding mass of thunderheads black and gray, covering the northern portion of the sky. Lightning flickers and the thunder rolls over the hills, and then everything is drenched in rain. I imagine the cowboy pulling up his collar, and hunching as he leads his horse down the trail, the rain dripping down from his hat. I hunch in my Mazda Miata and stare at the distant rain through the windshield, and grumble that I am so wet and miserable. I am a cowboy riding into the Hill Country in a Texas thundershower.

One evening, after I had moved to my apartment in the Hill Country, I heard a sound. I listened to it. It could not be a cicada because it was too late in the day, and it did not sound like a katydid. It sounded like a cricket with a hoarse throat. Actually crickets rub a "file" on one wing with a "scraper" on another to produce their chirps. So they don't really call using a vocal organ but instead use a stridulatory organ. But let's call it a "throat". It called in a scratchy voice, rather erratically for a cricket, and then it was silent. Then it started again. I ignored it. The next evening there it was again, that chirping sound, like a cricket with a hoarse throat. I pride myself in being able to recognize animal sounds, and so I began a search for all the insects that could possibly produce that sound. None of the Texas insects produced that sound.

I was working on research in frog choruses at that time and I happened to run across a web site on the frogs of Texas. And there it was, that scratchy hoarse call. It was the Cliff Chirping Frog (Syrrhophus marnockii). North American frogs usually call regularly with clear notes. I had not heard a frog call in this manner. The chirping frog lives in the cracks and crevices of limestone cliffs. But what is unusual about it is that it can run, in addition to hopping and leaping. All of us know that frogs and toads only hop and leap. They do not run. So this frog is rather unusual. I have one male living outside my apartment. There is a thicket of live oaks and Ashe junipers but no limestone. So I am not sure where it lives. But it is a pleasant companion on most evenings. Once I played back its song through a small loudspeaker, and it stopped calling. I was hoping to get a response from it. I was most annoyed.

It did get me thinking about why most frogs only hop and cannot run. A hop requires a coordinated contraction of all the leg muscles simultaneously so that it can power the jump. A run requires alternating movement of the limbs, it requires gait. It is a much more complex motor program. The neural motor commands for running and hopping are therefore different. Why did a certain species develop both? This is true for many species of birds as well. The common House sparrow hops, but the Roadrunner, a Texas bird, can run. This is a question that no one seems to have looked at.

I wander about late evenings trying to find the chirping frog, a flashlight in hand, searching and seeking this elusive beast. I have not seen one yet. I am embarrassed, afraid of being reported as a peeping-tom. This is the same reason why I do not stand in my balcony looking for the endangered Golden-cheeked warbler (Dendroica chrysoparia). This is a beautiful warbler with a lilting song, endemic to the Texas Hill Country, and the subject of my ongoing research on the bioacoustics of birdsong. I think I have heard the warbler near my apartment, but I cannot find it because every time I raise my binoculars I see a human looking at me. Sometimes the human is wearing a bikini. The swimming pool is right across. Pervert!

Under San Antonio, and stretching up into the Hill Country, is the Edwards Aquifer, named after the Edwards Plateau. The aquifer is a karst feature, meaning that it holds water in subterranean caverns. It is characterized by sinkholes that can be quite dangerous, and where water from rain runs underground. We get our water from the aquifer. It is one of the grandest features of our natural world. Life-giving, sustaining, we owe so much to it, and yet we are destroying it. I always monitor the level of the aquifer every day. Today it stands at 675.4 feet above mean sea level, 7.8 feet over the historical average for the month. You may think this is good, but it is not. We have had a good year of rains. Mostly, we are draining this reservoir without concern for our future. I live in Camp Bullis an area that is considered part of the region where the aquifer recharges after a rain. There are sinkholes, some large and dangerous, some no more than crevices in the limestone. And every time there is rain, I, most modern of cowboy’s, who drives a Miata instead of a horse, simply gloat. I watch the water seep into the ground and I am glad. The aquifer gives life not just to humans, but it gives life to a myriad of creatures that live in it. They include arthropods, crustaceans, fish, and tiny living things. Some of them are endangered. They share this world with me.

And so we have karst caverns with beautiful, surreal features, filled with stalagmites and stalactites, and weird natural formations forming stripes and patterns of all kinds. And bat droppings! It spreads in a thick black mass on the floor of the caverns, all of it petrified. I have been in these caverns. They are reminders of our past, of things as they were, once upon a time. One of the largest known underground bat caverns in the United States is Bracken Cave located North West of San Antonio, in adjacent Comal County. It is in the Edwards plateau. About twenty million Mexican freetailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) live in this cave. They stream out at night, taking hours to empty. They overwinter in Mexico, and do not hibernate like most other North American bats. To watch a similar sight you have to hang out on the Congress Avenue Bridge in nearby Austin. Three streams of freetailed bats emerge at dusk from under the bridge. It is quite a sight. But the bats do not number more than a million and a half or so. This is miniscule compared to what San Antonio has to offer. We are rich indeed.

The story of the Golden-cheeked warbler is fascinating, perhaps more to me than to you. It is a wood warbler, a so-called Parulid. Of all the North American Parulids, this particular species is endemic to Edwards Plateau. While other related warblers spread out to the Eastern and Western United States, this warbler stays here in the summer, in a restricted region. It breeds for a few months and then it returns to Mexico and Central America in the winter. I wonder why this particular species likes Edwards Plateau so much. A clue emerges in that much maligned Texas tree, the Ashe juniper (Juniperus ashei). Texans seem to hate it because its pollen causes allergies. They call it “cedar” when it is not a cedar, and they hack it off. The juniper berry is the source of gin, which with tonic, acts as the well-known social lubricant. The Dutch call it Genièvre, from which the word gin originates. We must thank the Dutch chemist Sylvius de Bouve for this remarkable drink that loosens all inhibitions.

The Golden-cheeked warbler does not nest in the Juniper tree. It peels the bark off the tree and then it flies over to the deciduous oak, where it builds a nest by tying together the strips of juniper bark with spider web. I never cease to wonder at the adaptability of life. Thus, this warbler requires the oak, the juniper, and the spider, to reproduce. And because of unchecked development and dislike for the juniper, this bird is fast becoming endangered. Along with my collaborator from San Antonio Parks, Wendy Leonard, we are studying the changes in the song of this warbler. It seems to have changed its song, much like humans have changed their speech. The Golden-cheek is one of the two endangered warblers in the United States. The other is the Kirtland’s warbler, also a Parulid.

There is so much to write about Texas and the Hill Country. It’s beauty, that calm sense of repose that I always feel when I am in it. I see the hills around me. In summer it is hot and arid, and I am surrounded by dense thickets of trees and brushes, wild flowers, and hardy plants. I have not written about these. There are oaks that would not be recognizable to those who come from the North. Live oaks, their twisting ancient trunks, stunted, and wizened with age, a home to cicadas and katydids. In winter, the leaves of some oaks survive, as do those of the conifers, whereas those of other oaks do not. They shed their leaves like other deciduous oaks, whereas some wait till spring until new leaves push out the old. There is always something new to see, something new to find in Texas. Like an infinite onion, you can peel the layers, and see more and more, and never find an end. This never-ending quest to understand Texas is the happiest of searches in life. It has no beginning and no end. It is a search for all that is simple and beautiful in this world of ours. It lies, under a Texan sun.

There is a fly in my food!

I was teaching a lecture on Gustation or “the sense of taste” to my class today. This is the graduate class on sensory physiology which I offer every fall. It is very entertaining because I can tell interesting, fascinating, and sometimes horrible things about animal behavior to a captive audience. Today I happened to remark on the feeding habits of the ordinary house fly (Musca domestica) and it drew some groans and disgusted looks.

Now, the house fly feeds in a really interesting way. It cannot consume solid food, so when it finds something tasty like feces, or your dinner portion of Daube Provençale de Bouef, both being equally preferred, it first secretes saliva to liquefy the food. A fly generates a lot of saliva because it is constantly buzzing around and feeding. After having thoroughly liquefied the food externally, much like mastication in humans, the fly extends a proboscis. This is a monstrous looking appendage with a soft fleshy ending, rather like large hairy lips, that descends from the head. The fly presses the fleshy ending of the proboscis onto the substrate and sucks up the liquefied food. It has to be seen to be believed, because it looks like something out of an alien horror movie. Occasionally it regurgitates what it has eaten and sucks it back up again. I watched it happen up-close once.

I was idling away my time as usual, at a student eatery. One of those graduate student places where cheap food in large volumes is sold at cut-rate prices. They save money by cutting back on cleanliness and hygiene, knowing that it is really, really, hard to kill a graduate student. As I picked up my plastic knife and fork, I noticed a fly settling on my food. By strange coincidence I happened to have a magnifying glass with me, so I whipped it out and observed the fly.

It settled down moving its antennae-like feelers about. Just around the mouth are small projections called the maxillary palps which allow it to taste food. The fly has gustatory (taste) receptors not just around the mouth, but also its legs and the hairy lips-like proboscis. They are chock-full of sensory receptors for tasting all kinds of goodies. The fly is quite extraordinary and efficient in its search for food. I watched its feelers moving about, and could barely make out the proboscis descend as it fed for a few seconds. Then it rubbed its antennae and I watched as it flew to another spot on my plate. It buzzed about for several minutes picking and choosing. Sometimes it didn’t like what it tasted and flew away to another spot. I wondered what it liked and what it didn’t. When it liked something it just hung about, and liquefied my food with its saliva and sucked it up. Then it hopped to the edge of the plate and I watched it closely. It left a tiny drop of yellow fluid before it buzzed away. It had regurgitated its food! I was astounded. Could it be my own food that it had thrown up? Or was it perhaps doggie doo dah feasted upon earlier? I didn’t know. Luckily the fly had left enough food for both of us, and having paid good money for it, I simply ate what was left on my plate. I skirted the suspicious yellow spot. You can never know where that thing had been.

I remember asking myself “why does the fly want to eat my food? Does it like human food?” Well, we don’t eat everything a fly eats, but it pretty much eats what we do eat. Why? Because most organisms require the same kind of nutrients and so taste is a basic sense. It evolved as a class of chemosensory mechanisms that include olfaction or the sense of smell, and gustation or the sense of taste. The basic question that the gustatory brain asks is “Is it yummy?” In the early history of our evolution it probably allowed us to differentiate what is nutritious from what is not.

Human taste receptors are found in the tongue in taste buds. Taste buds are found in a taste pore. They are onion shaped structures that contain several types of receptors in a mixed bag. These receptors put out tiny hairs or microvilli that wave about in the open pore. Our saliva constant flows on the tongue, dissolves the taste molecules, and delivers them to the taste buds. Receptor proteins, found on the microvilli of the receptor, bind to the taste molecule and activate the receptor and send a signal to the brain. Our receptors respond to five different types of taste. These are sweet, salty, sour, umami, and bitter. A single receptor may not be specialized for a given type of taste, as it may respond to more than one type of taste, for example sour and bitter.

Of these, only the first four are really “food” receptors. It is very likely that the bitter taste receptor evolved so that we could avoid poisons. The most common poisons are plant alkaloids and they are usually bitter in taste. So very early on in evolution, this receptor warned us that something bitter was poisonous and allowed us to expel it. In fact the receptor for bitterness is more sensitive than the others, allowing us to quickly expectorate even the tiniest amounts.

This is why, even today, few cultures eat really bitter foods even if they are actually safe and healthy. We are genetically predisposed to avoiding them. But there are some exceptions. Indians have cultivated a taste for bitter gourd, as have the people of the Far East. And the endive (from the chicory family of plants) is quite bitter, perhaps not as much as the bitter gourd. I say “cultivated a taste” because that is really so. You have to cultivate a taste for bitterness otherwise you will gag and expel it. The bitter receptor triggers the gag reflex.

If you think about the kinds of things that are good for us, and what we consider to be tasty, then you will understand why we have two of the other four receptor types. The sweet receptor senses sugars. Sugar is an important source of energy because of glucose, which is found in ordinary table sugar (sucrose is a disaccharide of glucose and fructose). From it we derive energy. The receptor also responds to saccharine, which has no nutritional value. This explains the mad rush to discover sugar substitutes. We want our sweet foods, we want that sweet taste, but we don’t want them to give us so many calories.

Umami is Japanese for “delicious”. The taste receptor for umami was discovered more recently than the others and it is receptive to amino acids. Why amino acids? Think meat. Meat is mostly muscle mass with some fat. And muscle is protein. And protein is made up of amino acids. It is good for us. We need it! The umami taste also refers to the savory or meaty taste of broths. It was first discovered because of the strong affinity of this receptor for monosodium glutamate or MSG (sold as Ajinomoto in Asian stores). I have never understood why people are so opposed to MSG. It is a sodium salt of the essential amino acid glutamic acid. Surely, this can’t be bad for us? Otherwise we wouldn’t have a receptor for it. Besides, it tastes so good. I have never suffered from it.

The salty taste receptor probably allows us to seek electrolytes, particularly the sodium cation (Na+) and other alkali metal cations. These electrolytes are important for maintaining homeostasis in cells and tissues. Remember that we came out of the ocean a very long time ago. Our cells are bathed in a solution containing the alkali metal cations. This is saline. We have never really forgotten our origins, nor have we given up that ambience. We still carry it around inside us. I remember seeing a video of monkeys in India once. They were standing in a long line in front of a rocky cave. One by one, they took their turn and licked at the walls of the cave. It was one of the more curious videos I have seen on animal behavior. I would like to lick that wall and find out what it tastes like. I bet it tastes salty.

Perhaps the most mysterious taste is the sour taste. We still do not know why we have this taste, and we know very little about how receptors sense this taste. Sourness is related to pH or the acidity of a solution, and is a measure of the concentration of hydrogen ions (H+) or protons. Why do we need a receptor for it since in every other way gustation is quite parsimonious? I don’t know.

I asked my class today why is it that we humans don’t have a receptor for fatty acids? Humans are carnivorous, and eating meat implies eating fat. Besides, kilo for kilo, fat delivers a huge amount of energy: 9 Kcal/kg. You would have to walk on a treadmill for 45 minutes at 6.5 km/hr every day, for about 18 days, to burn a kilo of fat. That's quite a lot of energy. It is the ultimate store of energy during good times, so that we may survive during the bad. I find it a mystery that we do not have a receptor for fatty acids, yet we do have the taste. Il Sogno, a very nice restaurant in San Antonio, serves a pizza with a topping of lard. Only lard. Yes, long strips of glistening white fat. I believe it is scrupmptious although I have never had it because I am a vegetarian. So, we can eat pure fat and like it. I think it is possible that fat from meat already has a savory or umami taste and so they may go hand in hand.Or perhaps saturated fats are associated with meat protein and the brain associates the former with the latter.

A few decades ago, the US government opened its doors to the import of palm oil from Malaysia. It is one of the three vegetable oils that are high in saturated fatty acids, the kind found in animal fat. So it has a nice meaty taste to it, and it is cheaper than other oils. Besides, saturated fats have longer shelf life. So, the economics of switching to it were compelling. French fries, fried in palm oil taste as though they are fried in animal fat. People in America liked the taste and couldn’t tell the difference. So even though we have no receptors for fatty acids there is something going on here that we need to research. As long as fat tastes meaty it will be consumed. This is the reason why restaurant food tastes so good. The more pricey restaurants cook their food in butter. Try consuming a table spoon of canola oil and you will find it unappetizing. It is a vegetable oil that is low in saturated fats. Go on! Try it! I have done it. But still, we do not know enough, and I am just speculating.

In contrast to humans, the house fly has four types of taste receptors, with some similarities to human taste receptors. The best known receptor is used for tasting sugars and amino acids (the S neuron). Another responds to water (the water receptor). It is known that this receptor triggers a feeding response. This makes sense because the fly generates a lot of saliva and needs a lot of water. We humans don’t have receptors for water which is why we can’t taste it. The third receptor responds to salt and alkali halides (the L1 neuron). The fourth and final receptor responds to sodium salts of fatty acids (Second salt receptor or anion receptor). Aha! At last we find a receptor for fatty acids! There is one, we just don’t have it.

I have not gone into the feeding behavior of flies in detail. One of its more fascinating aspects is the pumping action of food into the gut. There is a pump present in the pharynx where the food is once again tasted, and if it is found to be suitable, it is pumped through the esophagus. This pumping action was recently studied using a real-time X-ray device by some Harvard researchers. They wanted to determine the hydrodynamics of the flow. I think it is absolutely marvelous that someone is taking the trouble to do this kind of research.

Given that human food contains salt, amino acids, water, and fat, it is not surprising that flies want to share our food. We are far apart on the taxa, and yet we have somewhat similar tastes. Like all organisms, here is one more wonder of evolution. Superbly adapted, and pesky, I am in admiration of the fly. You may say that there is no accounting for the taste of some.

The Sounds of Sanskrit

What did the modern mind think when it awakened? When it encountered the wonders of the cosmos, our world, and this life? What questions did it ask? Or unmoved by the grandeur of the universe, did this awakened mind raise a hairy arm, expose a stinking armpit, and utter the memorable words, "gimme a beer"? We can never know. It happened such a long time ago, and there is no tradition that has survived. Neither the unwritten thoughts of our ancestors nor their unwritten speech. We can only guess. But we can listen to their sounds and the oldest oral traditions.  And we can guess. And so I guess. Do pardon me if I have hit, only to have missed.

Why do I even ask such impossible questions? And why attempt to answer? Because I was watching the yoga section of the recent Commonwealth Games opening ceremony held in Delhi. It was Patanjali's Yoga, set to an invocation of the master of Yoga, the sage Patanjali. A story of the integration of mind, body, and soul, by our ancestors. In confronting a world that was perhaps bewildering and frightening.

Those impossible yogic poses by young men and women, some no more than boys and girls, was bewitching enough. But what captivated me was the chanting. I listened to the throbbing rhythmic chanting of Sanskrit verse, the earliest sounds produced by our ancestors. And I listened spellbound. Indians are a truly weird people. I should know, being one myself. A Brahmin, inbred, perched on top of a distasteful and often brutal caste hierarchy that has survived from antiquity, virtually unchanged into modern times. Liturgical chanting was a Brahmin preserve. They clung to knowledge because it is power. It opened the doors to the divine. The earliest sounds I can remember are the chanting of Sanskrit verse in countless temples. My father dragged me around quite a lot, in a hapless and doomed quest for the salvation of my wretched soul. And so the chanting of Sanskrit verse always stirs a primitive rush of feelings, one that goes back to my ontogeny, and reflects the phylogeny of my species.

Sanskrit is a language of antiquity. Like Latin it is a liturgical language. When the West encountered it in the late 18th Century, the fact that was most astonishing was the Indian treatment of linguistics, in particular phonology. The West had nothing like it, not even in the Greeks. Western linguistics had a lot to catch up on. But the simple matter of the thing is that the early Indians were a scared lot, like people elsewhere. They stared at the skies and tried to comprehend life, and perhaps the purpose of it. Like others elsewhere, they developed speech and language, and found utterance for their wonders of the cosmos. They spoke in Sanskrit. Then they codified the grammar, the pronunciation, the morphology of words, and syntax, so that it was forever frozen. They were afraid that if they said their prayers wrong, mispronouncing the words, altering the syntax just a little bit, they would invoke the wrath of our numerous Gods. And there are quite a good number of Hindu Gods. Perhaps a billion or so. Female, male, carnal, ascetic, loquacious, silent, monstrous, angry, happy, half-human, half-animal, and so on. Pagan? Quite.

There is always a God somewhere ready to take umbrage at their awful pronunciation of the sacred words, ready to hurl bolts of lightning and unleash a pestilence. And so the result of their superstitions was one of India's most wonderful scientific achievements. It is the codification of language and speech in all its aspects. Their prayers were handed down from generation to generation in the most rigidly codified manner known to human beings. It allowed no deviation from the spoken word. Words had to be repeated generation after generation, preserved exactly, in cadence and phonemic utterance. We are talking of nearly three thousand years.

You have to understand that language, particularly speech and pronunciation, is highly malleable. It can change across two generations. If you listen to John F. Kennedy's speeches and the use of American English from the early 1960's you will understand what I mean. And it changes rapidly not just with time, but also across space. The English speak a quite different form of English, enunciating words in very different ways from Americans. Language and speech, unique human gifts, are ever-changing across space and time. To defy this natural process of change is to defy our changing selves.

How do you keep language constant so that it never changes? The Indians tried to do this. Panini is the pre-eminent Sanskrit grammarian of all time. Around the 5th Century BC, he sat down and codified Sanskrit so that it would never change. He did it orally because Sanskrit was not a written language. The Brahmi script came much later. There were other Indian grammarians who added to it. But India never gives credit to individuals. It gives credit to streams of thought, to additions, to commentaries, and to commentaries on commentaries, stripped off individuality. Indians are immensely raucous and argumentative. And there are quite a lot of them. There is just not enough space to recognize all of them. So, the individual is quite unimportant. But we do know that Panini dominated them all.

Nothing is known of Panini or his life. Except that he came from somewhere in modern Pakistan. I have tried to imagine him, skinny with bulging eyes, hyper-energetic, working like a maniac. Precise and pedantic. Or perhaps portly, relaxed, and contemplative. Loquacious and vague in words, but clear in thought. All such personalities are allowed. We are Indian after all. Precise and imprecise at the same time. Organized and categorical, and disorganized and indefinite. But it does not matter. Given India's disregard for individuals he must have stood out so much that he could not be ignored. If hagiography was not permitted, at least the transmission of his name was possible.

Noam Chomsky the MIT linguist, perhaps the greatest intellect of our times and one who revolutionized modern linguistics as we know it, acknowledges Panini as the forerunner of modern linguistics. What we do know is that Panini created a text, Asthadhyayi or "Eight Chapters", which codified the liturgical Sanskrit of those times, and provided the most concise description of any language. And I do mean the most concise. No other grammar is as concise. He had to make it concise because Sanskrit did not have a script, and he had to take care that it was capable of oral transmission. He did so using aphorisms, tersely stated to facilitate memorization. It is said to be among the monuments of human achievement, ranked with Euclid's treatment of Geometry, and Newton's Principia. In it he prescribed the rules of Sanskrit grammar, and more importantly, he prescribed their rules of pronunciation. How words should be uttered. Forever and without change.

The formal treatment in the Ashtadhyayi was independently discovered in modern times by computer grammarians. The terse aphorisms employed by Panini will be familiar to us because they are the formal rules of computer grammar. It is the basis of computer language. It is called the Backus-Naur form. And so it is, that we recognize the Ashtadhyayi to be the forerunner of modern theoretical linguistics and computer grammar. But Panini had been there much before. Around the time of Siddhartha Gautama, The Buddha. Nearly twenty five hundred years ago. Panini had hit upon the most concise rules for generative grammar, modern and yet antique. He stated how Sanskrit should be spoken for all of time. Thus it is that out of fear comes outstanding creativity. This is the human spirit, the foundations of our behavior.

When you listen to Sanskrit chanting, particularly the chanting of the Vedas, India's oldest sacred texts that go back four millenia, you hear the sounds of human beings awed by the cosmos. Fearful, superstitious, you hear their voice. And yet it is sophisticated, because such thinking is invariant across time. For they went beyond the mysteries of the cosmos. They explored problems in philosophy, psychology, and mathematics. Hence, the Vedas and hence the Yogasutras and hence the Ashtadhyayi. Hence our meditations. They found utterance in their rhythmic chants, preserved so that they may be ever unchanged, ever pleasing to the Gods, transmitted to recent times unchanged. I hear that chanting, without meter, but with discernible rhythm. It throbs and resonates within the soul. Precise rules of statement, memorized from time immemorial. They invoke the divine, laying bare our wonder of the unknown, and the wonder that is our unknowing self. An exploration of that which is without, and that which is within.

And lapsed Hindu that I am, a hard-boiled atheist, forever critical of modern India, I listen to the voice of my ancestors. For India is timeless and immortal. We are fire-worshippers, and we worship the Sun God, Surya, the most primitive forms of worship. We are a people who trace a direct line back to antiquity, more so than any other people in this world. And so I always respond to the voice of my ancestors. I hear the primordial sound Om, I hear their sophisticated sounds in the chanting of the Vedas, their transmittance to modern Indian classical and Bollywood music. I hear the unique melodic structure of the Indian raga that always stirs my soul, I hear the drums of India, and I go into a trance.

The sounds of Sanskrit, uttered with cadence and rhythm, are primordial sounds. Atavistic, primeval, they are raw. They are repeated, with phonemes repeated, with words broken and repeated backwards, and then rejoined to be repeated yet again, in strict order. There are well-defined rules in their utterance, and they aid memorization. From blind rote comes beauty of sound, the beauty of mathematical rules. The sounds of the Vedas are unforgettable and they stir the soul. From them emerge a pulsating rhythm that is musical. Indeed, the Sama Vedas gave rise to Indian classical music.

And so I remember my ancestors. I who also love Bach, Josquin des Prez, the Latin Mass, the finest of Western musical and intellectual traditions, listen to the voice of my past. In listening to that voice, I am reminded that I can trace a unique line back to antiquity, virtually unchanged. And I am comforted that I am part of that line of human evolution. I am at home, at ease. I own all of that from which I have come. 

The sounds of Sanskrit chanting are the earliest known sounds of the modern human. In listening to them I am ever reminded of my roots. Of my ancestors. But I am also reminded how far we human beings have come since then. I am reminded that there are other cultures, other traditions, that have also carried their thoughts forward. They have left their words in stone and paper, where we left ours in voice.

Under a Texan Sun: The South Texas Plains

You can see them at dawn or dusk, large flocks of American White Pelicans, swooping down to Mitchell Lake. Large ungainly birds that skim over the water and settle gracefully. They migrate north to the Canadian border in Spring, but every Fall they return to this lake in the South Texas Plains. They are peaceful and gregarious birds, floating serenely in large groups, sometimes a hundred or more. They have a habit of sitting in a long row on the windbreak barrier at the northern most edge of Mitchell Lake, where the shoreline is a long dyke lined with Mesquite and Huisache. The Pelicans are amusing to watch. One bird will swim up to the barrier and try to clamber onto it, and instead of shoving and jostling, the others move rather good-naturedly to accommodate the newcomer. When it gets too crowded one of them will get off into the water. It is like musical chairs. The males are easily identified in Spring by the growths protruding from their bills. They sit and preen and clean their feathers, and yawn a lot. I have wasted a lot of time watching Pelicans.

Mitchell Lake is one of the treasures of San Antonio. Originally created as a series of sewage settlement basins, it is a migratory stop on the Central Flyway, that vast and mysterious areal highway over which birds fly every season. From the Gulf Coast and onwards to Canada in Spring, and then the return in Fall. Bexar county and San Antonio sit smack on this highway. It teems with waterfowl twice every year. And within a span of a few weeks, the basins and wetlands of Mitchell Lake are crowded with Stilts, Sandpipers, Yellowlegs, Dowitchers, Phalaropes, Teals, Widgeons, Loons, Grebes, Shovelers, Ibises, and Spoonbills. A long list of waterfowl, shorebirds, and waders, busily feeding or wading in groups, occasionally breaking out into a squabble, but by and large a peaceable and gregarious lot. Up above, flocks of egrets, cormorants and herons return to their roost at dusk. And if you are a good enough birder you can identify flocks of Black-bellied Whistling Ducks, slender almost goose-like, as they swoop over the basins to perch in trees. The Whistling-duck is a very odd duck and very pretty. The big advantage with wetland birds is that they move very little, and rather slowly. So they can provide hours of amusement if you have a decent spotting-scope and patience. Each species has its own idiosyncrasies that bear observing.

Not all birds are as obliging as wetland birds. Songbirds certainly are not. During the day if you walk along the dykes separating the basins trying to spot warblers, you can run into a Red-eared slider, that ubiquitous pond turtle, as it ponderously moves from one basin to the next. Or encounter a rattlesnake sunning itself. Or step into the scat of raccoons or feral pigs. You must be careful to look at the ground even as you gape into the skies. In the trees and shrubs that line the dykes you can see the brilliant flash of the Vermillion flycatcher and Yellow-rumped Warblers as these are common. But more difficult to spot are tiny birds like Kinglets, or Gnatcatchers, and the busy wood warblers like the Black-throated Green warbler. American Pipits are more obliging as they are on the ground bobbing their tails up and down. And soaring up and down in their peculiar fashion are the graceful Scissor-tailed flycatchers. Look more carefully and you may see a Crested Caracara, and maybe an Osprey taking fish.

On nights, if you are fortunate enough to get access to the Lake, you can see the constellations wheeling overhead. Scorpio, most beautiful, hangs over the Southern sky with the Red-giant Antares glowing orange. During rainy years, in this otherwise arid scrub land, you can hear the sonorous calls of crickets and katydids. In the basins that are partially filled, the green treefrog chorus can be a deafening "Quank! Quank!" interspersed with the clicking chorus of cricket frogs or the deep "Bawooom! Bawooom!" of bullfrogs. Mitchell Lake is one of my field research sites. In good years I will be there at night with my microphones and recorders collecting frog chorus recordings. But like most parts of the South Texas Plains, it is arid, brush country with it's telltale flora of Husiache, Mesquite, Hackberry, Persimmon, and thorny shrubs. The leaves are small, and most trees and shrubs are short and dense, giving the name "brushland".

If you stand at certain places along the dykes, you can see alternating bands of green and blue where the dykes separate the basins and the lake. It is a shallow horizon that dazzles blue and emerald as it rushes swiftly upwards to meet the Texas sky. In its distinctive flora and fauna, this land is unique. Every living thing here is superbly adapted to its conditions. You still your mind and observe. Observe. On cloudless days in October, you can stand and watch the teeming ponds and basins, and the graceful pelicans on the lake. The sun slants downwards. You look up and close your eyes, and feel the cool wind from the lake whispering through the trees, shrubs, and grass. You open your eyes and look around. You find that you are in harmony with all that is around you. You are under a warm Texan sun.

Mitchell Lake: http://tx.audubon.org/Mitchell.html

Illinois

It was an endless expanse. I had never seen anything like it. Corn and Soy fields stretching to the horizon, broken by little country roads, and thickets of deciduous trees. After a hard winter, with snow blanketing the plains, frost covering trees, branches, and twigs, I watched it in a moment of pause, on a golden summer. The prairie winds swept prairie grass, with the silence broken by the solitary trill of a Redwing Blackbird perched on a goldenrod. The horizon was shallow, and green fields quickly gave way to a wide open sky, with cotton wool puffs of cloud drifting lazily across the azure sky. I stood and stared, entranced.

This was the land of Frank Lloyd Wright. My childhood hero when I grew up in foreign lands. Although a great admirer of this architect, I had never fully understood his prairie style of architecture. Until I saw the prairies. Until I saw the great flatness, and the vast sweep of the landscape. And then I understood his flat homes, hugging the landscape, with their wide sloping roofs, organically rooted to the soil. I had recently arrived from India to the University of Illinois. I was an engineer making the great leap into neurobiology. And Illinois was my first real experience of America and the Midwest.

And over the years I grew to love it. It became home. I could never get enough of those cold clear nights with Orion glittering in the sky, the air so still and the night so silent, that all you heard was the swish of the occasional wheels, as a car swept silently over the snow-packed street. I would sit outside, and look up at the giant oaks, maples and sycamores, the characteristic signature of the American Midwest. Their branches bare, intricate, delicate, covered in frost, silhouettes against a white snow-laden sky. Unmoving in the cold still night. Everything was still. And I would sit as Winter changed to Spring, and Orion gave way to the glorious Summer Triangle. And then, the bare trees would be transformed, their leaves a young soft green. And the cardinals would burst into song.

I would sit, drinking hot tea, year after year, an engineer struggling to become a biologist, against this constant backdrop of the changing seasons. The seasons changed and yet nothing changed. Nature worked on much longer time-scales, engineers on much shorter. On summer evenings, I would lie on the grass, the sky opening up from a circle of sycamores, maples, oaks and beeches. I would watch the Nighthawks in flight, mouths agape to vacuum insects, their wings outstretched. Open, flat, with the characteristic bar on the wings, and then, closing as they dived, to produce a boom. They were lovely birds to watch on a late afternoon in high summer. Graceful, and superbly designed to perform their function.

And afternoon gave way to dusk and the evening, and to the Summer Triangle. The first stars to appear overhead as the darkness gathered. The Summer Triangle! The loveliest object in the Northern summer sky. Vega in Lyra, Deneb in Cygnus, and Altair in Aquila. Glittering jewels, emphasizing all that lay beyond this precious earth, and all that lay around me.

I would lie for hours, watching the stars wheeling overhead, the diffuse milkiness of the Milky Way spreading like a misty veil across the Midwestern sky. I would hear the call of a Great Horned Owl, and close my eyes. And feel the gentle wind whispering across the grass. Upon a time, this was among the great grasslands of this world.

The spring and summer days were endless. I would walk through the last remnants of the tall grass prairies, scattered among railroad rights-of-way, or recreated. There were few virgin prairies left. But, life as it was back then, thrived wherever it could, asking humans for nothing more than a chance to survive. The goldenrods tall and vigorous, wild strawberries, flaxes, coneflowers, and Black-eyed Susans. And the ever present native sunflower. They reared their heads, pretty as ever, and ever so hardy. Binoculars were ever raised to catch an unusual warbler, a vireo, a kinglet. And ears peeled to hear the rat-a-tat of downy woodpeckers and flickers. And always, as if to emphasize that beauty is simplicity, there was the trill of the Redwing Blackbird, wings outstretched, a flash of red and orange, producing the loveliest sound of summer. Illinois is a lovely land, a blessed and fertile land. Summer or Winter, it is heaven. Its simplicity has a beauty that comes out of being itself.

I miss Illinois and the years I spent there. Texas is lovely and it has such great beauty. But Illinois was my first love on coming to America. It was here that an engineer became a biologist. It was here that I learned to love nature, and to listen to it. It is still without compare.