Summary of Current Event Science Article



Chemistry Reading Test

Summary of Selected Readings

There are five (5) articles attached to this assignment. Your assignment is to read and summarize each of these articles. Try to find the “big idea” of each of these articles. These summaries count as test grades. Each summary will be worth 20 points, making this assignment worth a total of 100 test points, or the equivalent of 1 regular test grade.

This assignment can also be found on my school website in the section directly under the picture of me and my bear on my welcome page. You can click on links there to access the articles with larger print.

Why this assignment?

The point of this exercise to cultivate good summarizing skills. The goal is to maximize content while minimizing “extraneous grammatical garbage”. It is called lexical density. Lexical density is defined as the number of lexical words (or content words) divided by the total number of words in a sentence or paragraph. Lexical words give a text its meaning and provide information regarding what the text is about. More precisely, lexical words are simply nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs. Nouns tell us the subject, adjectives tell us more about the subject, verbs tell us what they do, and adverbs tell us how they do it.

Other kinds of words such as articles (a, the), prepositions (on, at, in), conjunctions (and, or, but), and so forth are more grammatical in nature and, by themselves, give little or no information about what a text is about. These non-lexical words are also called function words. Auxiliary verbs, such as "to be" (am, are, is, was, were, being), "do" (did, does, doing), "have" (had, has, having) and so forth, are also considered non-lexical as they do not provide additional meaning.

With the above in mind, lexical density is simply the percentage of words in written (or spoken) language which give us information about what is being communicated. With regard to writing, lexical density is simply a measure of how informative a text is.

The point is to help you create a summary, or text in general, that is more concise and meaningful. Along with a grade, you will also be given a lexical density score. Hopefully you will see this score increase over the course of the five summaries. Average lexical density, for fiction writing for example, is slightly below 50%. Newspaper articles tend to be around 58%. A randomly selected article in a recent scientific journal was 68%. Usually scientific communications are about content and meaning and leaving out that “grammatical garbage”.

Summary Instructions:

Each summary must be typed using Word or Google Docs. It must be emailed to me as a document attachment (not an “invitation to edit” and not as text in an email) at tnagy@henry.k12.ga.us. The subject line of the email must be your name and article title (or number). Telling me that you emailed me is not sufficient proof that you turned in the article. I will send you a confirmation email if you request it. The assignments are due at 11:59 PM on the due date. However, I will accept them up to 48 hours late with no late penalty. After that, two (2) points will be deducted each day (including weekends, holidays, and vacations) the summary is not turned in. Please pay attention to the due dates. The first is due by the end of this week and then the dates are staggered every two weeks.

Article #1 – “Just Say No – To Bad Science”

Due Date: 1/6/2017 (January 6, 2017)

Article #2 – “Your Brain Online: Does the Web Change How We Think?”

Due Date: 1/20/2017 (January 20, 2017)

Article #3 – “It’s Survival of the Weak and Scrawny”

Due Date: 2/3/2017 (February 3, 2017)

Article #4 – “When Studies Collide: Rethinking the Evidence on BPA”

Due Date: 2/17/2017 (February 17, 2017)

Article #5 – “Praise the Humble Dung Beetle”

Due Date: 3/4/2017 (March 3, 2017)

Carefully read the following instructions. There are two (2) requirements for each article:

1) The article summary. The summary should be no more than 30 words in length. (Worth 15 points. Lose 1 point for each word over 30)

2) Identify and define 5 “science” vocabulary words from the article. (Worth 5 points)

Each summary should look like the following example:

Name: Ima Student Article Title – Article #

Summary:

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

Vocabulary terms:

Term 1 – Give its definition

Term 2 – Give its definition

Term 3 – Give its definition

Term 4 – Give its definition

Term 5 – Give its definition

Reading Assignment – Article #1

Begley, S. Just Say No – To Bad Science. Newsweek, May 7, 2007, 57.

When Doug Kirby sat down recently to update his 2001 analysis of sex-education programs, he had 111 studies that were scientifically sound, using rigorous methods to evaluate whether a program met its goals of reducing teen pregnancy, cutting teens' rates of sexually transmitted diseases and persuading them to practice abstinence (or, if they didn't, to use condoms). He also had a pile of studies that were too poorly designed to include. It measured three feet high.

For us civilians, it's hard to grasp how much of science is subjective, and especially how much leeway there is in choosing how to conduct a study. No one is alleging that scientists stack the deck on purpose. Let's just say that depending on how you design a study you can practically preordain the outcome. "There is an amazing array of things people do to botch a study," says Rebecca Maynard of the University of Pennsylvania.

For instance, 153 out of 167 government-funded studies of bisphenol-A, a chemical used to make plastic, find toxic effects in animals, such as low sperm counts. No industry-funded studies find any problem. It's not that the taxpayer-funded scientists are hallucinating, or that the industry scientists are blind. But here's a clue: many industry studies tested this estrogenlike chemical on a strain of rat that is insensitive to estrogen. That's like trying to measure how stress affects lactation ... using males.

Choosing the wrong methodology can lead science, and the public, astray. Early studies of hormone therapy compared women who chose to take estrogen pills and women who did not. The studies concluded that the pills prevent heart disease. Wrong. Women who chose to take hormones after menopause were healthier and more plugged into the medical system than women who did not. Differences in the women, not the effect of hormones, explained the difference in heart disease.

Which brings us to sex ed. In April, scientists released the most thorough study of abstinence-only programs ever conducted. Ordered up by Congress, it followed 2,000 kids, starting in grades 3 through 8, in rural and urban communities who had been randomly assigned to an abstinence-only program or not. Result: kids in abstinence-only "were no more likely to abstain from sex than their control group counterparts ... [both] had similar numbers of sexual partners and had initiated sex" at the same age.

Earlier studies gave abstinence-only glowing evaluations, as social conservatives publicized. The Heritage Foundation, for one, claimed in 2002 that abstinence-only had been proven "effective in reducing early sexual activity." But this is not a case of dueling studies, with no way to tell which to believe. If you dig into the earlier studies' methodology, you can see how they reached their conclusions.

Many evaluated programs where kids take a virginity pledge. But kids who choose to pledge are arguably different from kids who spurn the very idea. "There's potentially a huge selection issue," says Christopher Trenholm of Mathematica Policy Research, which did the abstinence study for the government. "It could lead to an upward bias on effectiveness."

Claims for abstinence-only also rest on measurements not of sexual activity, but attitudes. The Bush administration ditched the former in favor of assessing whether, after an abstinence-only program, kids knew that abstinence can bring "social, psychological, and health gains." If enough answered yes, the program was deemed effective. Anyone who is or was a teen can decide if knowing the right answer is the same as saying no to sex.

Other studies relied on kids' memory. But up to half of kids forget whether they took a virginity pledge, or pretend they never did. Those who fall off the abstinence wagon are likely to "forget" they pledged, while those who remain chaste might attribute it to a pledge they never made. Both factors inflate the measured efficacy of pledge programs.

A study of another abstinence program found it did a phenomenal job of getting girls to postpone their first sexual encounter. One problem: it evaluated only girls who stayed in the program, says Maynard. Girls who had sex were thrown out. In a related strategy, some studies of true sex ed, not the just-say-no variety, follow kids for only a few months, says Kirby of ETR Associates, a research contractor. But to see any difference between kids who took the class and those who did not, you have to let enough time go by for kids (in the latter group, one hopes) to have sex and get pregnant. A short time horizon may miss a program's effectiveness.

Authors of the problematic studies say they did the best they could with the time and money they had. OK, but as Trenholm says, "there is such a thing as good science and less good science." And you really can tell the difference.

Reading Assignment – Article #2

Begley, S. Your Brain Online: Does the Web Change How We Think? Newsweek, Jan. 18, 2010, 28.

Shortened attention span. Less interest in reflection and introspection. Inability to engage in in-depth thought. Fragmented, distracted thinking.

The ways the Internet supposedly affects thought are as apocalyptic as they are speculative, since all the above are supported by anecdote, not empirical data. So it is refreshing to hear how 109 philosophers, neurobiologists, and other scholars answered, "How is the Internet changing the way you think?" That is the "annual question" at the online salon , where every year science impresario, author, and literary agent John Brockman poses a puzzler for his flock of scientists and other thinkers.

Although a number of contributors drivel on about, say, how much time they waste on e-mail, the most striking thing about the 50-plus answers is that scholars who study the mind and the brain, and who therefore seem best equipped to figure out how the Internet alters thought, shoot down the very idea. "The Internet hasn't changed the way we think," argues neuroscientist Joshua Greene of Harvard. It "has provided us with unprecedented access to information, but it hasn't changed what [our brains] do with it." Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker of Harvard is also skeptical. "Electronic media aren't going to revamp the brain's mechanisms of information processing," he writes. "Texters, surfers, and twitterers" have not trained their brains "to process multiple streams of novel information in parallel," as is commonly asserted but refuted by research, and claims to the contrary "are propelled by ... the pressure on pundits to announce that this or that 'changes everything.' "

And yet. Many scholars do believe the Internet alters thinking, and offer provocative examples of how—many of them surprisingly dystopian. Communications scholar Howard Rheingold believes the Internet fosters "shallowness, credulity, distraction," with the result that our minds struggle "to discipline and deploy attention in an always-on milieu." (Though having to make a decision every time a link appears—to click or not to click?—may train the mind's decision-making networks.) The Internet is also causing the "disappearance of retrospection and reminiscence," argues Evgeny Morozov, an expert on the Internet and politics. "Our lives are increasingly lived in the present, completely detached even from the most recent of the pasts ... Our ability to look back and engage with the past is one unfortunate victim." Cue the Santayana quote.

These changes in what people think are accompanied by true changes in the process of thinking—little of it beneficial. The ubiquity of information makes us "less likely to pursue new lines of thought before turning to the Internet," writes psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of Claremont Graduate University. "Result: less sustained thought?" And since online information "is often decontextualized," he adds, it "satisfies immediate needs at the expense of deeper understanding (result: more superficial thought?)." Because facts are a click away, writes physicist Haim Harari, "the Internet allows us to know fewer facts ... reducing their importance as a component" of thought. That increases the importance of other components, he says, such as correlating facts, "distinguishing between important and secondary matters, knowing when to prefer pure logic and when to let common sense dominate." By flooding us with information, the Internet also "causes more confidence and illusions of knowledge" (Nassim Taleb of MIT, author of The Black Swan), but makes our knowledge seem "more fragile," since "for every accepted piece of knowledge I find, there is within easy reach someone who challenges the fact" (Kevin Kelly, cofounder of Wired).

Even more intriguing are the (few) positive changes in thinking the Internet has caused. The hyperlinked Web helps us establish "connections between ideas, facts, etc.," suggests Csikszentmihalyi. "Result: more integrated thought?" For Kelly, the uncertainty resulting from the ubiquity of facts and "antifacts" fosters "a kind of liquidity" in thinking, making it "more active, less contemplative." Science historian George Dyson believes the Internet's flood of information has altered the process of creativity: what once required "collecting all available fragments of information to assemble a framework of knowledge" now requires "removing or ignoring unnecessary information to reveal the shape of knowledge hidden within." Creativity by destruction rather than assembly.

Reading Assignment – Article #3

Huang, L. It’s Survival of the Weak and Scrawny. Newsweek, January 12, 2009, 49.

Some of the most iconic photographs of Teddy Roosevelt, one of the first conservationists in American politics, show the president posing companionably with the prizes of his trophy hunts. An elephant felled in Africa in 1909 points its tusks skyward; a Cape buffalo, crowned with horns in the shape of a handlebar mustache, slumps in a Kenyan swamp. In North America, he stalked deer, pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep and elk, which he called "lordly game" for their majestic antlers. What's remarkable about these photographs is not that they depict a hunter who was also naturalist John Muir's staunchest political ally. It's that just 100 years after his expeditions, many of the kind of magnificent trophies he routinely captured are becoming rare.

Elk still range across parts of North America, but every hunting season brings a greater challenge to find the sought-after bull with a towering spread of antlers. Africa and Asia still have elephants, but Roosevelt would have regarded most of them as freaks, because they don't have tusks. Researchers describe what's happening as none other than the selection process that Darwin made famous: the fittest of a species survive to reproduce and pass along their traits to succeeding generations, while the traits of the unfit gradually disappear. Selective hunting—picking out individuals with the best horns or antlers, or the largest piece of hide—works in reverse: the evolutionary loser is not the small and defenseless, but the biggest and best-equipped to win mates or fend off attackers.

When hunting is severe enough to outstrip other threats to survival, the unsought, middling individuals make out better than the alpha animals, and the species changes. "Survival of the fittest" is still the rule, but the "fit" begin to look unlike what you might expect. And looks aren't the only things changing: behavior adapts too, from how hunted animals act to how they reproduce. There's nothing wrong with a species getting molded over time by new kinds of risk. But some experts believe problems arise when these changes make no evolutionary sense.

Ram Mountain in Alberta, Canada, is home to a population of bighorn sheep, whose most vulnerable individuals are males with thick, curving horns that give them a regal, Princess Leia look. In the course of 30 years of study, biologist Marco Festa-Bianchet of the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec found a roughly 25 percent decline in the size of these horns, and both male and female sheep getting smaller. There's no mystery on Ram Mountain: male sheep with big horns tend to be larger and produce larger offspring. During the fall rut, or breeding season, these alpha rams mate more than any other males, by winning fights or thwarting other males' access to their ewes. Their success, however, is contingent upon their surviving the two-month hunting season just before the rut, and in a strange way, they're competing against their horns. Around the age of 4, their horn size makes them legal game—several years before their reproductive peak. That means smaller-horned males get far more opportunity to mate.

Other species are shrinking, too. Australia's red kangaroo has become noticeably smaller as poachers target the largest animals for leather. The phenomenon has been most apparent in harvested fish: since fishing nets began capturing only fish of sufficient size in the 1980s, the Atlantic cod and salmon, several flounders and the northern pike have all propagated in miniature.

So what if fish or kangaroos are smaller? If being smaller is safer, this might be a successful adaptation for a hunted species. After all, " 'fitness' is relative and transitory," says Columbia University biologist Don Melnick, meaning that Darwinian natural selection has nothing to do with what's good or bad, or the way things should be. Tusks used to make elephants fitter, as a weapon or a tool in foraging—until ivory became a precious commodity and having tusks got you killed. Then tuskless elephants, products of a genetic fluke, became the more consistent breeders and grew from around 2 percent among African elephants to more than 38 percent in one Zambian population, and 98 percent in a South African one. In Asia, where female elephants don't have tusks to begin with, the proportion of tuskless elephants has more than doubled, to more than 90 percent in Sri Lanka. But there's a cost to not having tusks. Tusked elephants, like the old dominant males on Ram Mountain, were "genetically 'better' individuals," says Festa-Bianchet. "When you take them systematically out of the population for several years, you end up leaving essentially a bunch of losers doing the breeding."

"Losers" tend not to be very good breeders, meaning that this demographic shift ultimately threatens the viability of a species. Researchers also worry that the surviving animals are left with a narrower gene pool. In highly controlled environments, a species with frighteningly little genetic diversity can persist—think of the extremes of domesticated animals like thoroughbred horses or commercial chickens—but in real ecosystems changes are unpredictable. Artificially selecting animals in the wild—in effect, breeding them—is "a very risky game," says Columbia's Melnick. "It's highly likely to result in the end of a species."

At present, researchers' alarm about these trends are based on theories that are hard to prove. To make scientific claims about the effects of hunting on the evolution of a species, researchers like Melnick would need thorough data from animal populations that lived at least several decades ago, which rarely exist. Evolution, it turns out, is a difficult beast to study in real time because it is the product of so many factors—changes in climate, habitat and food supply, as well as gene frequencies—and because it occurs so slowly. Researchers began tracking sheep on Ram Mountain in the early 1970s, corralling the entire population every year to make measurements and trace genealogies. "You cannot really just go out and take data and look for a trend," says Festa-Bianchet. "Even if you find a trend it can be due to environmental changes, to changes in density. You're really trying to tease out the genetic part of the change."

The time scale is one reason that most wildlife departments managing hunting harvests simply count the heads each year and decide how many to let hunters bag without thinking about genes. The most popular method of regulating hunting—restricting legal game to males with a minimum antler size—results in populations overrun with females and inferior males, which is ultimately no service to hunters. "The hunters wish for animals with large antlers and large horns, and yet their actions are making that harder to achieve," says Richard Harris, a conservation biologist in Montana. As a hunter, Harris knows that the outcome of this trend will satisfy no one, the Teddy Roosevelts of the next generation least of all.

Reading Assignment – Article #4

Begley, S. When Studies Collide: Rethinking the Evidence on BPA. Newsweek, June 29, 2009, 28.

Research shows. Studies have found. Scientists conclude. Each of those phrases can be completed, accurately, with any one of the following: That it's possible to use ESP to see the location of someone far away. That exposure to lead at everyday levels does no harm to the developing brain. That hormone replacement protects women against heart disease. My point is not that science is always tentative and that scientists are fallible, though both are certainly true (since all three of the above are wrong), but that almost anyone with an agenda can find research to support it.

Keep that in mind this summer when the Food and Drug Administration issues its report on bisphenol A, the chemical building block of polycarbonate, the hard plastic used for some baby bottles and water bottles, and of the epoxy resins that line food cans. In her first appearance before Congress as FDA commissioner, Margaret Hamburg told a House panel this month that the agency is reconsidering its decades-old position—reiterated last year—that BPA at current levels of exposure poses no harm to human health. You can be sure that if FDA deviates from that conclusion, the plastics industry will deploy the three phrases above, completing them with "—that BPA is perfectly safe."

Whether that's true can be answered only by empirical data. But not all empirical data are created equal. BPA studies that a spokesman for the American Chemistry Council described as "definitive," for instance, have come in for criticism on three fundamental grounds, not including that they were partly funded by industry (I don't reflexively assume that industry-sponsored research is suspect; whether a study is good or not depends on how it was conducted). First, research in 2002 used a strain of rat that is extremely insensitive to estrogen; it doesn't even show hormonal effects if it's given 100 times the dose of estrogen in human birth-control pills. Since BPA acts like an estrogen, finding no effect in this insensitive rat is about as illuminating as not finding an effect of rain on a waterproof watch. That doesn't tell you that water can't harm machinery. Second, a 2008 study found that prostates in mice not exposed to BPA—these were the control animals—were 70 percent larger than normal. That's a problem: other studies have shown that BPA enlarges the prostate by about 35 percent. If you're looking for a prostate effect by comparing BPA-exposed mice to mice with mysteriously abnormal prostates, it's no wonder BPA gets exonerated. Finally, another 2008 study compared BPA to estradiol, a form of estrogen. But estradiol had never been used to provide such a baseline, so concluding that BPA is less potent than estradiol—as industry does—is like saying one temperature is higher than another when you don't even know if the thermometer works.

Evidence on the other side is both stronger and more convincing. I can regale you until I'm out of space with studies showing that in monkeys, levels of BPA at the upper end of what the U.S. government calls safe harm synapses responsible for learning and memory; that people with the highest levels of BPA are most likely to have type 2 diabetes or heart disease; that BPA given to pregnant lab animals permanently alters the expression of genes responsible for uterine development and damages the reproductive system of their fetuses. More telling than individual studies is the weight and quality of the cumulative evidence. Based on that, the FDA's Scientific Advisory Board last year rebuked the agency for failing to consider all credible evidence when it called BPA safe for use in food containers, and the Endocrine Society issued its first "scientific statement," concluding this month that for chemicals like BPA, "the concern is real."

That concern is likely to rise as the FDA takes account of new data showing that people are exposed to more BPA than it assumed when it concluded that exposure to BPA is within the margin of safety. In a study presented at the Endocrine Society, scientists led by biologist Fred vom Saal of the University of Missouri found that monkeys fed 400 times the amount of BPA that the government assumes people ingest had lower levels in their blood than the average American. For BPA levels in people to be higher than in monkeys that practically gorged on the stuff, we must be ingesting way more than the FDA thinks. Where are the higher amounts coming from? In addition to hard plastic and epoxy can linings, it turns out, newspaper ink and carbonless copy paper—the stuff of credit-card receipts and all sorts of business and medical documents—contain high amounts of BPA. Recycled, they wind up in food containers such as pizza boxes, along with the BPA. It's never a good thing if people are exposed to more of a chemical than safety agencies thought, and if studies giving that chemical a clean bill of health are so troubled. As common sense (never mind research) shows.

Reading Assignment #5

Begley, S. Praise the Humble Dung Beetle. Newsweek, June 9, 2008, 52.

Nothing against polar bears, which Sacha Spector loves as much as the next biologist, but to really get him going you need to ask about beetles. Specifically, dung beetles, whose disappearance would undoubtedly leave less of a void in our collective heart than the polar bear's but would rip a bigger hole in the web of life. Without the dung beetles that roam America's rangelands and pastures, animal droppings would not get rolled up and buried.

Seeds in the droppings would not get dispersed. Populations of parasites and disease-carrying pest species such as flies, to which the raw droppings on the ground are like condos with MOVE RIGHT IN! signs, would explode. Nutrients in the waste would be washed away rather than returned to the ground. Spector, who runs the invertebrate program at the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History, could go on, but you can tell from his voice that he knows he's fighting a losing battle. Getting people to care about the 238 species of spiders, clams, moths, snails, isopods and other invertebrates on the list of endangered species is about as likely as a magazine putting a photo of a dung beetle rather than a polar bear on its cover.

Of all creatures great and small, it is the charismatic megafauna—tigers and rhinos and gorillas and pandas and other soulful-eyed, warm and fuzzy animals—that personify endangered species. That's both a shame and a dangerous bias. "Plants and invertebrates are the silent majority which feed the entire planet, stabilize the soil and make all life possible," says Kiernan Suckling, cofounder of the Center for Biological Diversity. They pollinate crops and decompose carcasses, filter water and, lacking weapons like teeth and claws, brew up molecules to defend themselves that turn out to be remarkably potent medicines: the breast-cancer compound taxol comes from a yew tree, and a leukemia drug from the rosy periwinkle. Those are tricks that, Suckling dryly notes, "polar bears and blue whales haven't mastered yet."

Since the lesser beasts of the field can't just muscle their way to survival, they tend to have talents that higher ones—with more brains as well as brawn to draw on—don't. As a result, they're loaded with gizmos that human engineers are tapping for inspiration. The Namibian beetle, for instance, has tips on the bumpy scales of its wings that pull water from fog, a design that has inspired a fog-harvesting net (it's used in cooling towers, industrial condensers and dry farming regions). The spiral in mollusk shells, which fluids flow through especially smoothly and efficiently, has inspired a rotor that draws up to 85 percent less energy than standard fans and is finding its way into computers and air conditioners. Biologists are cloning mussel proteins to produce an epoxy, mimicking the bivalves' ability to stick to rocks, that is expected to rival any superglue on the market. The American burying beetle, which feeds on carrion, can smell death from afar. "It can find a dead mouse [which it eats and feeds, regurgitated, to its offspring] within an hour of its demise from two miles away," says Quentin Wheeler, director of the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University. "Think of the potential if we could mimic that for finding earthquake victims."

Biologists draw an analogy between ecosystems and airplanes. The latter can fly without some of their rivets, and the former can survive without some of their species. But in neither case can you tell how many, or which ones, are dispensable until the thing crashes. "Some 99.99 percent of spe- cies that ever existed have disappeared, and nature moves on," notes Wheeler. "But you can never predict what the consequences will be in the short term, especially for humans who rely on the services that invertebrates provide." But after a species' numbers plummet, the effects haven't been pretty. For instance, as freshwater mussels have declined (70 percent of their species are threatened or endangered), taking with them their filtration services, water quality in streams, rivers and lakes has deteriorated badly. In the Chesapeake Bay, each adult oyster once filtered 60 gallons of water a day, packaging sediment and pollutants into blobs that fell harmlessly to the bay floor. Before the population crashed in the 1990s, oysters filtered 19 trillion gallons—an entire bay's worth—once a week. The survivors struggle to do that in a year. The result is cloudy, more polluted water, and a loss of fisheries and baymen's livelihoods.

The value of creepy-crawlies is not reflected in which creatures are protected by the Endangered Species Act, and this one isn't the Bush administration's fault. Like the rest of us, scientists gravitate toward the huggable. The upshot is that much less is known about invertebrates, including whether they're in danger of extinction, than about mammals. "With 57 insect species on the endangered list, out of 90,000 in the U.S., either there's something unbelievably resilient about insects or we're off by an order of magnitude in how many are in trouble," says Spector.

If Earth's species are a living library, then polar bears and other cuddly mammals are the best-selling beach reads. Everything else is the volumes of history and literature and other scholarship, written in the alphabet of DNA: 99 percent of all animals are invertebrates. To understand the history and the majesty of life requires reading, and thus preserving, those volumes.

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