Nevada Desert Worldview Collision

Editor’s Note – Last month we explored the relationship between the worldviews of Art, Science, and Public Policy.  This month we push onward into the worldviews of Business and Commerce, about which I know even less, as we shall see.

Sometimes, I identify snails for money.  I hasten to add that I am always happy to do so for free, if your specimens (or jpeg images thereof) are accompanied by good data, especially if the request is courteous. But sometimes I receive requests from environmental consultancies, who have themselves been contracted to collect the specimens in question, and they expect to pay me as a subcontractor.  Fine, I’ll take your money.  I charge $25 per sample.

Pyrgulopsis kolobensis, Nevada

So in the spring of 2020 I received my first inquiry from an officer of an environmental consulting operation in Colorado whom I will identify as Ms. Nickle-Chaser, or N-C for short.  She wrote a single line over a forward from a mutual colleague recommending me to identify “springsnails in Northern Nevada,” simply adding, “Would you be able to help?” 

I replied in the affirmative.  And there followed the usual back-and-forth about contracts, work authorizations, chains-of-custody and so forth.  I am an utter foreigner in the world of business and commerce – I understand that the motivation is money but cannot imagine how anybody could be so motivated.  I am able to cooperate in such situations as a dog commanded to sit and shake.

Nor, in retrospect, did Ms. N-C understand the language of science and technology in which I addressed her.  Here is a quote from quite early in our negotiations, 29Apr20: 

"I usually work with samples preserved in 70% ethanol, although higher concentrations are better.  The USPO pitches a fit about shipments containing ethanol, however, as do some of the private carriers, sometimes.  So a trick is to put the snails in a little unbreakable vial full of ethanol, and then stuff cotton down in the vial, and then pour off any excess ethanol.  So you can reassure the clerk that your shipment does not contain any liquids.  Just wet cotton, right?"

So, a few weeks later I got an email heads-up from N-C that a 15” x 12” x 15” box weighing 19 pounds was on its way from Denver to Charleston, by UPS next-day air.  And she noted, “Ice will be partially melted I expect.”  Nineteen pounds flown across the country by overnight express?  Good grief, I thought to myself – how much must that cost?  Surely whatever I charge for the identification of a few samples of snails will be dwarfed by the cost of their shipping, yes?

 

And indeed, six samples did arrive quite promptly the following evening.  Each was contained in a wide mouth 500 ml Nalgene bottle of (what smelled like) denatured ethanol, packed in ice, packed in a cooler, double-bagged, packed in a box, elaborately taped, dripping a puddle on my front porch.

 

I was disappointed not to find any locality data for the six samples – just number codes written on the bottles.  Looking back at our early correspondence, I probably should have emphasized the importance of such data with greater urgency.  I do save data on the distribution of all freshwater gastropods collected across the entirety of North America into the FWGNA database.  My excel spreadsheet has 13 columns, including not just state, county, latitude and longitude, but also collector and date of collection, and those data are just as important as the sample specimens themselves, and indeed the latter worthless without the former.

Central Eureka County, Nevada

So I requested locality data in my email confirming receipt, and Ms. N-C replied with lat/long coordinates the next day – six tiny green cracks in the arid Cortez Mountains of Eureka County, Nevada.  And I went to work.

 

The samples turned out to be quite various.  One contained a beetle and a pebble.  Two were unpicked bulk samples, one of which ultimately proved to include snails, and the other of which did not.  And three were clean samples of snails.  These were my results for the four samples that contained snails, as I ultimately reported them on 8June20:

• Three of your samples contained Pyrgulopsis kolobensis, one of the more widespread springsnails of the Great Basin, ranging eastward into Utah.
• One of your samples contained Pyrgulopsis gibba [1], also widespread, ranging west into California.
• Two of your samples also contained common pulmonate gastropods, Lymnaea cubensis and Physa acuta.

And I concluded, “Attached you will find an excel spreadsheet with my detailed results, and an invoice, in the amount of $125.” [2]

 

This information apparently satisfied my customer, and my customer’s client as well.  For in the spring of 2021 I received a second inquiry from N-C, which I was again happy to answer in the affirmative.  And negotiations were exchanged, very nearly identical to those we had exchanged in 2020.  N-C had originally expected to send me “several samples in the June or July timeframe,” but her field trip was slightly delayed.  Here is the message I received 24July21: 

"Hi there. I just wanted to let you know that we are going to begin spring sampling for snails starting tomorrow and will be shipping them toward you hopefully on the 29th but may ship it out on the 30th. We will try to overnight that and get it to you rapidly.  Thanks."

The next morning I sent Ms. N-C a reassuring reply, to the effect that I am retired, and in no hurry whatsoever.  And in boldface I asked her this question: “Why are you planning to send your samples to Charleston by overnight express?  Why not good, old-fashioned US Snail-mail?”  And I signed it, “What is your hurry? Rob”

 

At 10:30 Friday morning 30July21, a three-foot cooler appeared on my doorstep, containing 10 double-bagged 500 ml Nalgene bottles of what smelled like denatured ethanol packed in ice.  Good God, that thing must have weighed 40 pounds.  I acknowledged receipt immediately, reminding her about the necessity of locality data, for which (one would think) there might have been room in each of the 500 ml bottles, somewhere.  And in her reply of 11:46 AM, N-C answered the question I had asked her five days earlier as follows: 

“Years doing water quality monitoring taught me the best way to send samples.  Those suckers are worth thousands of dollars, when you factor in time spent planning, surveying, shipping, etc.  It would be a bummer to have to go back out and resample on our dime.”

And she did follow up with the locality data.  And at that point, there was no reason to argue with her about the 40-pound overnight shipment.  I suppose I might have reviewed some of the differences between a sample of water and a sample of preserved freshwater gastropods, and explored the consequences those differences might suggest in shipping methodology.  But her frame of reference was monetary, not scientific.  She was speaking a language that I did not understand, and I understood that.

 

So again, I went to work.  All ten of the 2021 samples also turned out to have been collected from Eureka County, Nevada, but from wetter environments than the 2020 samples.  Most of these were from ponded springs in pastureland, impacted by cattle.  Only two samples contained hydrobiids (P. kolobensis) but all ten contained pulmonates, with six species represented [3], most interestingly Lymnaea (Galba) bulimoides [4].  I sent Ms. N-C a spreadsheet, a formal report, and an invoice for $250 on 5Aug21, and received payment on 17Sept21.

Lymnaea (Galba) bulimoides, Nevada

And my satisfied customer contacted me again in the springs of 2022 and 2023, and very similar business transactions occurred.  Big coolers appeared on my doorstep by overnight express, filled with ice and Nalgene bottles but not locality data.  The 2022 shipment, ten samples collected from the vicinity of the town of Beatty in Nye County, Nevada, were almost entirely of Physa acuta, with a sprinkling of L. humilis.  For some reason it especially irritated me to see hundreds of dollars spent shipping trash snails across the country by overnight express.  But on the other hand, I was beginning to accumulate a nice collection of free coolers.

 

At this point I feel called to set aside the orderly unfolding of my narrative, and confess a personal shortcoming.  Not only are the language, values, and culture of the World of Business foreign to me, I am unsympathetic to them.  I have spent my entire career with my right foot firmly planted in the World of Science, and my left toe delicately touching the World of Public Policy [5].  In both of those worlds, Pyrgulopsis and Physa are entirely different things.

 

As a scientist, I know that Bob Hershler kicked the five (mostly eastern) species of Pyrgulopsis listed in the (1980) Burch cannon [6] up to 54 (western) species in 1994 [7], and that by the end of his career, Bob was recognizing 126, mostly on the basis of negligible DNA sequence divergence and penial characters of dubious biological significance [8].  My left toe tells me, however, that the Nevada Division of Natural Heritage lists 76 nominal species of Pyrgulopsis within its vastly trapezoidal borders, the great majority of which are ranked “G1 = critically imperiled globally.”

 

So, if Ms. N-C were to discover a population of 3 mm prosobranch snails in a Nevada spring, I might be able to understand some special care in their shipment to an expert across the country.  But if she were to find a population of “those suckers” bearing thin, sinistral shells in the ditch behind a McDonald’s restaurant licking the special sauce off the back of a Big Mac wrapper, she could just send me a jpeg, am I right?  But please, in any and all cases, regardless of what those suckers look like, is it too much to ask for locality data?

Charleston.  August 31, 2024

We were headed for a worldview collision.  On 17July24 I received what had (by that point) become my annual greeting from Ms. N-C, reporting that she had a “very small project in Nevada that needs a snail ID on perhaps 3 samples,” and asking if I would be able to assist.  And I replied that I would be happy to help as usual.

 

And on 31Aug24 a hefty 1.5’ x 2’ x 2’ box arrived with a thump on my doorstep, overnight air from Nevada.  It weighed in excess of 13 pounds.  Inside the box (1) I found four layers of plastic bags (2): damp, wet, soaked, and dripping puddles on my wife’s dining room table.  And inside the fourth bag was (3) a little red cooler exorbitantly taped with three layers of a deceptively-strong clear packing tape that defeated every knife in my kitchen.  And sloshing about within that cooler was (4) a single 500 ml Nalgene bottle of alcohol.  And inside that bottle of alcohol, I found (5) one, single little shell.

 

Not a snail, mind you, a shell.  A single lymnaeid shell of 5.5 mm standard length, translucent in its pristine emptiness.  It had belonged to an individual Lymnaea (Galba) cubensis/viator, which if not a trash snail exactly, let me simply say that whole government agencies have been charged to eradicate.  Thirteen pounds of packing material for an empty shell that could not weigh more than 80 mg.

Lymnaea (Galba) cubensis/viator

 

And where is my GDMF locality data?!?? Vainly I pawed through 13 pounds of dripping debris on my wife’s dining room table for any collection information – where was this specimen collected, when and by whom?  All I found was elaborate chain-of-custody paperwork marked simply “Nevada.”

 

I suppose, in retrospect, I should have laughed.  But in fact, I lost my temper entirely.  I was overwhelmed by the absurdity of the situation in the World which I call home.  Having never had a phone number for N-C, I went to my desktop computer to fire off an email, acknowledging receipt.  And I characterized her packing job as “stupid, just plain stupid,” which (I now realize) was over the top.  I continued that I had “no idea whose money she was wasting,” but that I would “no longer be a part of it.”  And I concluded [9], “Here’s the identification of your crappy little shell (Lymnaea cubensis/viator).  But you can keep your crappy $25!”

 

Looking back on that email, with over a year to cool down now, I owe an apology to Ms. Nickle-Chaser.  She was just trying to run a business, and her subcontractor went nuts on her.  The contracts I signed simply said “snails,” and in the world of business, a snail is a snail, even if it’s just a shell.  I feel sure that N-C had adequately budgeted for the elaborate shipping of that empty shell in whatever contract she had signed with whatever strip mall developer or strip mine digger had engaged her services, and that a couple hundred bucks meant nothing to her, much less to them.  I was butting in on a business decision made by Ms. N-C, just as I butt in on that artistic decision made by Ms. Julia Galloway last month.

The world of business and commerce is not compatible with the world of science or the worldview of public policy.  There is no relationship between playing baseball, playing banjo, and playing Hamlet.  But those worldviews are not incompatible either.  Just very simply, and very profoundly different. 

 

I speak the language of science fluently; I can speak a dialect of pidgin-policy; I am profoundly deaf to business. And so, I apologize to Ms. Nickle-Chaser.  But I cannot promise her it won’t happen again, if she ever attempts to reconnect with me, which she has not.

 

Notes

 

[1] For figures of the shell and penial morphology of Pyrgulopsis gibba, together with a brief review of the systematics and evolution of western Pyrgulopsis in general, see:

• Just 125 species of Pyrgulopsis in the American West [7Sept22]

[2] I did not bill for the clean beetle/pebble sample.  But did bill $25 for the snailless bulk sample I had to pick.

 

[3] Lymnaea humilis (8 sites), L. bulimoides (4), Physa acuta (4), L elodes (2), L stagnalis (1), Aplexa elongata (1).

 

[4] In 2021 I was still identifying bulimoides (erroneously) as a subspecies (“techella”) of Lymnaea (Galba) cubensis.  For a review of my laborious untangling of the confusion between bulimoides and cubensis/viator, see:

• What is Lymnaea bulimoides? [13Feb24]
• Oregon, bulimoides, or bust [13Feb25]
• The phantom lymnaeid of the Pacific Northwest [11Mar25]
• Lymnaea (Galba) bulimoides and the NCBI GenDump, with lecture notes on the scientific method [8Apr25]

[5] Well actually, I spent most of my career a sojourner through a third world entirely, that of Education.  And left little mark in that strange land

[6] This is a difficult work to cite.  J. B. Burch's North American Freshwater Snails was published in three different ways.  It was initially commissioned as an identification manual by the US EPA and published by that agency in 1982.  It was also serially published in the journal Walkerana (1980, 1982, 1988) and finally as a stand-alone volume in 1989 (Malacological Publications, Hamburg, MI).

[7] Hershler, R. (1994) A review of the North American freshwater snail genus Pyrgulopsis (Hydrobiidae).  Smithsonian Contributions to Zoology 554: 1 - 115.

 

[8] For more about the career of Dr. Robert Hershler, and his model of the evolutionary relationships among populations of the hydrobiid genus Pyrgulopsis, see:

• My Buddy, Bob [6July22]
• Just 125 species of Pyrgulopsis in the American West [7Sept22]

[9] But added as a PS, “Thanks for the cooler.”

Art, science, and public policy: A dialogue in three languages

I have a lot of friends and family who enjoy travel, and spend a substantial amount of time and money doing it, and imagine that their hobby returns some sort of profit to the intellect or character.  Isn’t travel broadening?  Don’t we learn from exposure to new lands, new cultures, new value systems, new ways of looking at the world?  Yes, of course.  But I found countless worldviews, cultures, and value systems trumpeted in the morning headlines at the end of my driveway this morning, ripe for engagement in the aisles of the grocery store across the street this afternoon.  No further travel is required.

As my loyal readership will attest, I have long been fascinated by the diversity of worldviews I encounter in my workday life, and the relationships between them.  The index item at the right of your screen labeled “Worldview Collision” will link to eight essays on the subject when I push the “submit” button on the present post.

The majority of my seven previous essays have explored the relationship between the worldview of science and the worldview of law or public policy, among the most common of the culture clashes in my experience. To understand their proper relationship I have adapted an analogy I first developed about twenty years ago during the height of the most recent creation/evolution controversies between science and religious faith.  Scientists play baseball, lawmakers and regulatory agencies play banjo.  Those worldviews are not incompatible, in the sense that my father was both a banjo picker and a catcher.  But not compatible, either.  Nobody ever tries to integrate one with the other. 

I favor the baseball/banjo analogy because most of my colleagues in the world of science seem to have a better grasp on the proper relationship between sports and art than between science and anything else, possibly because we are more objective.  We don’t write grant proposals to shortstops, nor debate fiddlers over the 10th grade biology curriculum.

 

Indeed, I rarely interact with artists in my professional life [1].  Thus, an email I received this past August (18Aug25) from one Ms. Julia Galloway [2] fell upon my eye as dew drops from heaven.  She introduced herself as: 

“… a professor and ceramic artist based in Montana. I’m currently working on a project focused on raising awareness about endangered species. For this project, I am creating ceramic urns to represent each threatened, endangered, recovered, and extinct species in the U.S. The project will culminate in the creation of approximately 1,200 urns, with completion expected by 2027.”

Ms. Galloway went on to explain that she had created “400+” urns as of that mid-August date and had (apparently) worked down from the California Condors to the freshwater gastropods, finding her supple hands now poised over a throw of clay to be entitled, “Anthony’s Riversnail.”  And googling about the internet for inspiration, she had found my “fabulous photo” posted on the FWGNA site.  And requested permission to use.

 

How fascinating!  The concept of “endangerment” is purely a matter of law, of course, and “raising awareness” a political objective.  Here an artist addresses a scientist over a matter of public policy. A conjunction of three worlds.

 

On 21Aug25 I replied to Ms. Galloway certifying, as I always do, that all of the images on the FWGNA site are freely available for anybody to use for any purpose whatsoever, and offering to help her in any other way I could.  And I concluded, doing my best to address her in her native tongue: 

“Notice that there's a photo of Leptoxis crassa (“Anthony’s Riversnail”) in situ at the bottom of (the species) page [here].  Which brings me to my final point.  Bless your heart!  These things are brown bumps on a rock.  God made them by throwing little balls of clay at dirt.  If you can make art out of Leptoxis crassa, my cap's off to you.”

 And to the bottom of my email of 21Aug25 I added, “PS – 1,200 urns? Are you nuts?”

Brown bumps in Limestone Creek, AL.

Here the challenge of communication across cultures was on full display.  At no point in her initial email to me, nor indeed in any of her subsequent correspondence, did Ms. Galloway mention the rich symbolism just below the surface of her artwork.  Her urns are modeled after the funerary urns of ancient Egypt.  But, quoting from her website, “displayed empty as a sign of hope.”  Anthony’s Riversnail may be on its sickbed, by this metaphor, but it ain’t dead yet.

 

Ms. Galloway replied immediately thanking me for my “delightful and thoughtful reply,” confessed that she does feel a little bit nuts at times, and asked me if I would like to see images of the urn upon completion. And I responded immediately in the affirmative, and suggesting that she just “throw a couple balls of clay at a flowerpot” to expedite the process.

 

I was tremendously impressed to receive the set of three jpegs below on the afternoon of 22Aug25, less than 24 hours after I had granted Ms. Galloway permission to use FWGNA imagery.  Maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised – with 400 urns down and 800 to go, she must be nothing if not efficient.  Three individual snails were depicted various faces of the Anthony’s Riversnail urn, one snail crawling to the left (a) and two crawling to the right (b, c), as from the vantage point of a wary stonefly.  None of these images was modeled, as far as I could tell, from anything on the FWGNA site.  At least overtly.

 

Although starkly beautiful in their execution, I immediately noticed a couple significant technical problems with this urn.  Or at least, they seemed significant to me.  So on 23Aug25 I addressed my third email to Ms. Galloway.

And this time, I felt compelled to speak a little bit of science.  I began with some background on gastropod coiling, so as to introduce the adjectives “sinistral and dextral,” and noted that no case of sinistrality has ever been documented in the Pleuroceridae, as far as I know.  I then wrote:

“You have depicted three individual snails on your urn, am I correct?  The images of which you labeled on the jpegs you sent me yesterday afternoon AO22-a, AO22-b, and AO22-c, yes?  Snail (b) is bearing a dextral shell, correct as you have sculpted.  But snail (a) and snail (c) are bearing sinistral shells.  Not only is that uncomfortable to my eyes, it is unscientific.”

That seemed harsh.  So I added, to soften the blow:

“Perhaps you were working from (somebody else's) closeup photograph of a pleurocerid animal, reversed in some popular publication or on the internet?   Amateurs often publish reversed images, careless of the difference.  In fact, it seems highly unlikely to me that anybody other than a professional malacologist would ever notice the chirality of the snails you have sculpted on your urn.  So if you want to let it go (as Queen Elsa would suggest) I would certainly understand.”

Well, a couple weeks passed.  And I honestly did not think I would ever hear from Ms. Galloway again.  At the rate of one urn per 24 hours, I imagined that she must be well into the unionid mussels by that point, gastropods let go, gone, and forgotten.  But on 2Sept25, I was most pleased to receive yet another lovely communication from my artist-pen-pal:

“Thank you so much for bringing chirality to my attention! I loved reading your email and learning more about gastropods. It's always a treat when I get to hear someone talk passionately about their field of study (especially when they're brown bumps on a rock).

 

Sometimes species have very few images, which was the case with this species. Not knowing about chirality, I flipped some of the images to give myself more viewing angles and compositional options. Now that I know about how snail shells grow, I would like to remake the urn. Would you happen to have any additional images of Anthony's River Snail that you could share?

 

Thank you again for taking the time to share this information with me and for your support! Take care and I hope to hear from you again soon!”

Well no, I myself did not have any additional photos of L. crassa showing anything that the couple images already posted on the FWGNA species page did not.  But on a whim, I executed simple a google-image search on “Athearnia anthonyi” and landed, of course, on the Wikipedia page [3].  And good grief.  The image at the top of the Wikipedia page is sinistral!

Wikipedia. From Dick Biggins, USFWS.

So on the evening of 4Sept25 I addressed my fourth email message to Ms. Galloway, apologizing on behalf of the entire profession of freshwater malacology, re-assuring her that Dick Biggins (the donor of the photo) is a careful worker and confessing that I could not imagine that he himself would upload a mirror-reversed image.  But regardless of how the error occurred, I was sorry that some member of our extended community had not fixed it by now.  Not it.

 

I then suggested three remedies: (1) Sculpt the Wikipedia image from a mirror, (2) Adjust the Wikipedia image using the Photoshop mirror-image-reverse button, or (3) model from some other pleurocerid. Honestly, at the resolution of a funerary urn, all pleurocerid bodies are indistinguishable.  I sent her a good image of some other pleurocerid individual crawling to the viewer’s right, so that she would have both left-travelling dextral and right-travelling dextral models to work from.

 

And on 7Sept25 Ms. Galloway thanked me once again, and asked me if I would like to see images of “the new and improved urn when it is completed?”  To which I replied in the affirmative.  But I never heard from her again.  And that’s OK.

 

The philosopher Ian Barbour (1923 – 2013) has suggested [4] that there are four ways in which worldviews might relate: (1) independence, (2) dialogue, (3) conflict and (4) compatibility.  Independence is the unexamined status quo, compatibility a pipe dream, and conflict is right out.  I love, love, love dialogue.

 

The relationship I have demonstrated above is (2) a dialogue between the worldview of science and the worldview of art.  One might subclassify it as (2a) science helps art.  Ms. Galloway asked me to help her.  I did everything I could to do so.

 

Science and art are not incompatible, here obviously.  But mark me well.  Science and art are not compatible either.  They are very simply, and very profoundly, different.  Ms. Galloway is an artist, and she took the lead in this interaction, and I (a scientist) did what I could to help her create a work of art, and at no point did anything that happened between us during our entire two-week interaction have anything to do with science whatsoever.  The pleurocerid images she carved into that pot could bear sinistral shells, or dextral shells, or polka-dot shells, it does not matter.  And in fact, she never asked me for any of the free advice I offered her at any point, and in retrospect, I may have been interfering with the creative process, and if I ever hear from her again, I will apologize for butting in.

 

But I can’t help it, I love that sort of thing. The proper relationship between our worldviews is one of dialogue.  A dialogue with a fine artist is like an expedition into the bush with a Hottentot, from the seat of my own kitchen table.

 

And here is the most interesting thing about my two-week dialogue with Ms. Galloway.  This particular artist’s motivation was not artistic, but political. 

 

The Oxford Dictionary defines art as “an expression of human skill producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.”  But to quote from Ms. Galloway’s website, she considers her work “a catalyst for social change.” 

 

She selected Anthony’s Riversnail as one of her 1,200 subjects because that particular gastropod was entered onto the Federal Endangered Species list on April 15, 1994, see 59 FR 17994-17998 [5]. And “By creating an urn for each (such) species, (she) is making (rarely-seen) species visible, and through this awareness, compassionate action is possible.”  In other words, Ms. Galloway apparently thinks that the worldview of art and the worldview of politics are compatible, such that the former can influence the latter.

 

Bless her heart.  You will have by now noticed that no representative from the world of politics or public policy walked into the bar with the artist and the scientist to this point in my essay, nor will one subsequently appear.  I myself was awarded a AAAS Congressional fellowship many years ago, and learned just enough of the language spoken on Capitol Hill 1981 – 82 to appreciate my limitations.  And I do know quite a few hardworking biologists employed by natural resource agencies, both state and federal. And speaking now for all the legislative bodies and all the regulatory agencies and all the departments of natural resource management involved in all the endangered species conservation nationwide, as well as the entire [6] gastropod fauna of Limestone Creek, Madison County, Alabama, thanks for the pot.  Not a great likeness, but it’s lovely, dear, it really is.

Dave Michaelson & Randy Sarver

Art and Public Policy have different languages, different cultures, different values, and different ways of looking at the world. That they are not incompatible is witnessed by Ms. Galloway herself, who is both an artist and a social activist.  But the worldviews are not compatible, either.  Neither art nor public policy can affect the other, any more than the marching band affects the halftime score, or the halftime score the marching band.

 

But lest we condescend.  Of all the holders of all the worldviews of all the world – Art, Science, Business, Finance, Law, Medicine, Engineering, Religious Faith, Harry Potter, or Star Trek, we scientists are the most arrogant.  The notion of science-based public policy is just as absurd as pottery-based public policy, and none of us seems to realize it.

 

On the morning of 4Sept25, the same day I was to send my fourth email to Ms. Galloway, I met my good friend Randy Sarver in the parking lot of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, Jefferson City. Randy is an excellent biologist, and we have developed a warm relationship over many years, and he helped me unload four flats of empty black-capped vials that used to hold macrobenthic samples collected by the MoDNR 2015 - 2017, and swap them for a fresh batch of MoDNR macrobenthic samples 2017 - 2018. 

 

I am sure that Randy and Dave Michaelson and all our friends at the MoDNR do a great job monitoring the water quality of the Show-Me State, and I would never dream of offering them any advice whatsoever, because I can’t, any more than they would dream of offering me any advice about malacology, because they can’t.  Randy and I are in dialogue.  That’s the thing I love.

 

Notes:

 

[1] I actually did post one previous essay on the relationship between science and art, way back in 2011:

• When Science and Art Collide [4Feb11]

 [2] Learn more about Ms. Galloway from her lavish web presence:

• Julia Galloway [home]
• Endangered Species Project [direct]
• Wikipedia [page]

 [3] Wikipedia, accessed 10Dec25 [link]

 

[4] Here I am generalizing Barbour’s thought on the science – religion relationship to the relationship between worldviews of any sort.  His “fourfold typology” was most clearly stated in:

• Barbour, I. G. (2000) When Science Meets Religion: Enemies, Strangers, or Partners?  Harper, 205 pp.

[5] For the Democrats among my readership, who imagine that findings such as those published in the Federal Register on 15Apr94 have anything to do with science whatsoever, please refresh your memory with the ten essays I have written on the Snake River Physa scandal to date.  Actually, you could skip the first six, if you want, and go straight to:

• The SRALP and the SRNLP: A new hope [14May24]
• The SRALP and the SRNLP: Physa acuta were found [11June24]
• The Twelve Phascinating Physa of Bliss [2July24]
• Cytoplasmic Male Sterility in the Snake River Physa [7Aug24]

[6] Fourteen species comprise the exuberant gastropod fauna of Limestone Creek: four pleurocerids, three hydrobioids [7], three viviparids, and four pulmonates.  I feel certain that all have benefited from the endangered status of their most-famous member.

[7] Counted among the Limestone Creek hydrobioids is a population of Marstonia olivacea, which is a senior synonym of Marstonia ogmorhaphe, which was the other gastropod entered onto the Federal Endangered Species list 15Apr94.  And hence that hydrobiid population should be every bit as federally-protected as the pleurocerid "Athearnia anthonyi," but it isn't, because public policy has absolutely nothing to do with science.  For more, see:

• Is Marstonia olivacea extinct? [19Sept23]

The Mystery of the SRALP: "No Physa acuta were found."

Editor's Notes - If you’re just joining us.  This is the fourth and final installment in my 2013 series on the Snake River Physa controversy.  It won’t make any sense unless you back up and read February, March and April first.  I’m serious, I mean it, and I’m in no mood to be trifled with, this month in particular.

This essay was subsequently published as: Dillon, R.T., Jr. (2019d) The Mystery of the SRALP: No Physa acuta were found.  Pp 187 - 192 in The Freshwater Gastropods of North America Volume 4, Essays on Ecology and Biogeography.  FWGNA Press, Charleston.

Over two years have passed since the Dixie-cup showdown in Boise, and I will admit that I have been anticipating the formal publication of the Gates & Kerans report with mixed emotions.  On the one hand, I was pleased to see that the replacement of the Minidoka Dam spillway was approved shortly after our meeting in September of 2010 [1] and that actual construction got underway in November of 2011.  On the other hand, the “Record of Decision” published by the USBR after our September meeting contained language strongly implying that its water management options had been significantly narrowed by the presence of putatively endangered physids in the Minidoka tailwaters.  And a regular program to monitor physid populations has been continued through the duration of the spillway replacement project, to the present day.

So the Gates & Kerans paper was published online in late December, with old-fashioned paper publication following in February of 2013 [2].  And I was initially encouraged to see that a substantial volume of fresh sequence data has been added since 2010, and that the authorship has been expanded to include John Keebaugh, Steven Kalinowski, and Ninh Vu [3]. But my heart sank when I read these five words: “No Physa acuta were found.”

As I flipped through the pages of the PDF reprint I recognized much that was familiar: the heroic 2006-08 survey of the Minidoka Dam tailwaters yielding 274 small, oddly-shaped physids, the anatomical observations “courtesy of John B. Burch,” and the mtDNA gene trees with outgroups fished from GenBank, none sampled closer than Wyoming.

In addition, the authors reported an expansion of their mtDNA survey to include a very peculiar sample of physids collected hundreds of miles downstream from the Minidoka Dam (RM 675), all the way across southern Idaho.  Here is the single line from their methods section relevant to this enlarged sampling effort, quoted verbatim: “Museum dredge samples collected from the Snake River between RK 322 (RM 200) and RK 948 (RM 589) from 1995 to 2003 were re-examined to determine species distribution.”  The authors did not offer any explanation regarding the gear or methodology used for “dredging,” but one might infer that samples thus obtained came from deeper water, not from the shallows.

The (N=19,427!) individual physids in this “museum dredge sample” were screened for their match to Taylor’s [4] original description of the P. natricina shell: “small size (maximum of 4.8 – 6.9 mm shell length, plotted above), ovoid shape, inflated body whorl, well-impressed suture, broadly rounded anterior end with a wide aperture making the greatest width anterior to the midlength of the shell, microsculpture of oblique growth lines, and a series of parallel spiral lines consisting of curved arcs with their concavity toward the shell aperture.”  Through this elaborate winnowing process passed 52 individuals (collected from RM 559 to RM 368), 15 of which yielded mtDNA sequence data.  All 15 of the new, downstream mtDNA sequences matched the sequences previously recorded from the Minidoka tailwaters and referred to Physa natricina in 2010.

Gates and colleagues concluded, “Our results confirm the original description of P. natricina as an endangered species and expand the extant distribution” some 200 river miles downstream from the range suggested by Taylor, all the way across Idaho into Hells Canyon on the Oregon border.

And you found no Physa acuta?  Did you even consider getting off I-84 anywhere between Twin Falls and Boise, driving five miles south, wading ankle-deep, bending over and simply picking up any of the plain, ordinary, crappy, acuta-like Physa that you have been repeatedly told for five years [5] are as common as cockroaches in that river?  Or did you gin up a meticulous sampling scheme cynically designed to exclude the 99.7% of the snails in your sample that might possibly be identified as a Physa acuta?

No Physa acuta were found?  Did you even look on Sunday morning, 19Sept10, when we visited the Minidoka tailwaters together [6]?  Or did three of you literally turn your backs on me and spend hours sampling a habitat where you knew no Physa acuta (of any standard morphology) could possibly be found, in an overt and calculated effort not to find them?

No Physa acuta were found?  What did you do with the 30 snails I handed you [7] on Monday morning, 20Sept10, before God, the Bureau of Reclamation, the US Fish & Wildlife Service, and the choir of malacologists invisible?  Flush them down the toilet?

No Physa acuta were found?  Carve it on the tombstone of the misbegotten excuse for a science that calls itself “Conservation Biology.” 

Science and politics do not mix.  When they have bastard children, science is recessive.  Gates, Kerans and their colleagues may have positioned themselves well to write new proposals, win new grants, train more students and perpetuate their wretched enterprise in the waters of the Snake River for years to come.  But I am done with it.

Notes

[1] A nice selection of documents having to do with the Minidoka Dam Spillway Replacement project, including the Environmental Impact Statement and the Record of Decision, are available from the USBR website here: [USBR Minidoka page]

[2] Gates, K. K., B. L. Kerans, J. L. Keebaugh, S. K. Kalinowski & N. Vu (2013) Taxonomic identity of the endangered Snake River physa, Physa natricina (Pulmonata: Physidae) combining traditional and molecular techniques.  Conserv. Genet. 14: 159-169.  [html]

[3] I was surprised not to find the name of John B. Burch among the authors.  On 21July09 I was in the audience for a seminar given by Prof. Burch at the AMS meeting in Ithaca, where he presented a great deal of background information on P. natricina as the senior author of a paper with John Keebaugh and Taehwan Lee.  And at the Boise meeting of 20Sept10 he defended the morphological observations as though they were his own.

[4] Taylor, D. W. (1988) New species of Physa (Gastropoda: Hygrophila) from the western United States. Malac. Rev. 21: 43-79.

[5] Rogers, D. C. & A. R. Wethington (2007) Physa natricina Taylor 1988, junior synonym of Physa acuta Draparnaud, 1805 (Pulmonata: Physidae). Zootaxa 1662: 45-51.

[6] The Mystery of the SRALP: A twofold quest!  [1Mar13]

[7] The Mystery of the SRALP: Dixie-cup showdown!  [2Apr13]

When worlds collide: Lumpers and splitters

Apparently I have the reputation of being a “lumper.”  The subject came up last month when I was visiting my friend Tim Pearce, curator of mollusks at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh.  Tim asked me a question, which was not actually in the form of a question, but rather phrased as a “philosophy of classification,” upon which he invited me to comment. Tim’s proposition was as follows: 

In the face of uncertainty, it is better to split than to lump.  Because if additional information subsequently becomes available suggesting that two taxa you have split should have been lumped, it will be trivially easy to lump them.  But if additional information becomes available suggesting that two taxa you have lumped should have been split, your entire data set may have been ruined, because information has been lost. 

My first response to Tim was that I’ve never been in such a position.  And my second response was that I could not imagine how such a situation could ever exist.

Is our ignorance complete and our uncertainty absolute, such that we have no existing taxonomy to guide us, no reference works of any sort to fall back on, nor any data to point us in one direction or the other?  And is somebody now holding a pistol to our heads, forcing us to make our decision?  We can’t simply leave the organisms unclassified?

The situation seems to be that we have been transported in shackles to Brazil, and made to classify beetles for our supper, without a guidebook.  I actually could not make my mind address Tim’s premise.

And then it occurred to me that Tim had phrased his proposition not as a question of science, but as a “philosophy of classification."  And it dawned on me that he and I were speaking different languages.

At dinner that evening Tim and I sorted the situation out.  As a museum curator, Tim spends most of his professional life with what we resolved to call a “Worldview of Information.”  He shares this worldview with print publishers, almost everybody involved in the (rapidly becoming omnipresent) internet, and anybody who may be left in the (rapidly becoming obsolescent) library.  Tim’s primary focus is not on the production of information, but on its management, organization, storage, and retrieval.

I spend most of my professional life with a Worldview of Science.  Science is the construction of testable models about the natural world.  The Worldview of Science is not incompatible with that of Information, of course.  When I publish a new hypothesis, or gather data supporting an existing hypothesis, I create information.  But Science is not compatible with an Information Worldview, either.  Because I focus on the quality of a model – old or new, good or bad – with no regard whatsoever for the organization, storage or retrieval of the information that will be generated as a byproduct.

The existence of parallel worldviews, each with its own language, culture, values and assumptions, has been a recurring theme on this blog for quite a few years now.  Most often I have contrasted the Worldview of Science with that of Politics and Public Policy – hit the “Science and Public Policy” tag at right for more [1].  I also posted one essay (back in February, 2011) contrasting Science with the Worldview of Art [2]. 

Religious faith is another obvious example of a parallel worldview.  I have a great deal of experience in the relationship between Science and Religion, although I have not published on this blog about the subject.  In other fora [3] I have compared that relationship to playing baseball and playing the banjo - neither more valid or more true, neither better nor worse, not incompatible, but not compatible, either.  Simply, profoundly different.

Subatomic particles are too small to see, but physicists can tell they are there when they run into each other.  The various Worldviews I have catalogued above – Art, Science, Politics, Religion and Information – are too big to see.  But one can tell they are there when they run into each other.

I have long derived embarrassing levels of schadenfreude from the Creation/Evolution controversy because I enjoy watching at least three [4] worlds collide - Science, Faith, and Politics.  Sitting in a meeting of the Senate Education Committee hearing testimony on creationist legislation we can watch baseball teams and bluegrass bands trying to drive nails with banjos and catcher's mitts, before a crew of carpenters.  I find this intellectually fascinating.

Science and Religion can collect Information into a three-world collision as well.  A google search on the keyword "evolution," for example, will return a steaming bouillabaisse of Science and Religion mingled in baffling fashion.  My good friend Kelly Smith from the Philosophy Department at Clemson has recently indicted the Information community for aiding and abetting Religion in its ongoing attacks on Science [5].

But the first commandment in Tim’s worldview is this: "Thou Shalt Not Lose Thy Information."  So seen in that light, his question about lumping and splitting put me in the position of a heathen, standing before the Spanish Inquisition.  Who could have expected that?

And my first commandment is this: "Thy Model Shalt be the Best."  As a scientist, I am horrified not simply by the quality of the information on “Wikipedia,” but indeed by the very concept of open publication itself [6].  I've spent a lot of time working with the NCBI GenBank in recent months, for example, and it turns out they will let any bonehead upload any string of the characters A, T, G, and C and call it anything.  The NCBI online resource may be dressed up like Science, but it is no more scientific than the B-Minor Mass.  And I don’t much care for Bach.

Ian Barbour

We'd all probably agree that worldview conflicts, whether they take the form of monkey trials, endangered species panels, or just prickly little interactions between museum curators and evolutionary biologists, are a bad thing.  But are they unavoidable?

My favorite treatment of worldview collision is that of the distinguished philosopher Ian Barbour [7].  Barbour's work specifically addresses the relationship between Science and Religion, but his ideas will generally apply to the relationship between Science and Public Policy, or Science and Information, for that matter.  In addition to conflict, Barbour has proposed three other forms of worldview interaction: independence, dialogue, and integration.

Independence is the model that Steven J. Gould famously called "Nonoverlapping Magisteria [8]."  And independence does indeed describe the actual relationship between baseball teams and bluegrass bands quite accurately.  Nobody has ever tried to bring a banjo into the batter's box, as far as I know.

All of the problems I have outlined above, however, arise from the intellectual appeal of integration.  Preachers do in fact propose science from their pulpits, and scientists do in fact propose public policy in their seminars, metaphorically carrying their banjos into batter’s boxes with the regularity of the tides.  In such situations, the only alternative to conflict is dialogue.

The first steps toward peace between two peoples are taken when those peoples begin to understand that they are, in fact, two peoples.  So I welcomed the dialogue Tim and I had in Pittsburgh last month, and do hope it will continue.  I am more than happy to let colleagues from the Worldview of Information handle all matters of data flow, storage, and retrieval.  We should be pleased if they would leave the Science to scientists.

Notes

[1]  Worldview collision is most explicitly addressed here:

Idaho Springsnail Panel Report [23Dec05]

When Pigs Fly in Idaho [30Jan06]

Red Flags, Water Resources, and Physa natricina [12Mar08]

Mobile Basin IV: Goniobasis WTFs [13Nov09]

[2]  When Art and Science Collide [4Feb11]

[3]  Only for those of you who can speak (or at least read) Religion!

• Dillon, R. T. (2008)  Stonewall, Woodrow, and Me: Reflections on the other great commission.  SciTech, The journal of the Presbyterian Association on Science, Technology, and the Christian Faith 17(3): 7 - 9. [pdf]
• Dillon, R. T. (2011) Charles Darwin and Theodicy.  (A celebrity death match between Rob Dillon and Francisco Ayala!)  SciTech, The journal of the Presbyterian Association on Science, Technology, and the Christian Faith 20(1): 1-3.  [pdf]
• Dillon, R. T. (2012)  Science and the Christian Religion: A Sermon in Three Acts.  Preached at Circular Congregational Church, Charleston, SC.  February 12, 2012. [pdf]

[4] I see three worlds colliding because I can understand their three languages.  I am fluent in both Science and Religion, and speak some Politics.  The Worldview of Education is also always represented in the constituency at hearings on creationist legislation, although silently.  On rare occasions somebody seems to attempt a pidgin form of Business and Commerce (“A rigorous science curriculum is necessary to advance South Carolina’s competitiveness.”)  But I don't speak any Money at all.

[5] Smith, Kelly C. (2012)  I Also Survived a Debate with a Creationist (with Reflections on the Perils of Democratic Information).  Reports of the National Center for Science Education 32(2): 6.  [pdf]

[6] The irony of publishing this statement in a blog post does not escape me.

[7] Barbour got his Ph.D. in Physics from Chicago in 1950, swapping over for a B.Div.