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Science is fueled by passion, a passion that is often attached to the world of objects much as the artist is attached to his paints, the poet to her words. From my first days at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976, I saw this passion for objects everywhere. My students and colleagues told how they were drawn into science by the physics of sand castles, by playing with soap bubbles, by the mesmerizing power of a crystal radio.

Since this was the early days of computer culture, there was also talk of new objects. Some people identified with their computers, experiencing these machines as extensions of themselves. For them, computers were useful for thinking about larger questions, questions of determinism and free will, of mind and mechanism. For me, training as a humanist and social scientist moved me to investigate the role of objects in scientific creativity and the development of young minds.

Objects don't nudge every child toward science, but for some, a rich object world is the best way to give science a chance. Given the opportunity, children will make intimate connections, connections they must construct on their own. But at a time when science education is in crisis, many of us discourage the object passions of children, perhaps out of fear that they will become "trapped," learning to prefer the company of objects to the company of other children. Indeed, when the world of people is too frightening, children may retreat into the safety of what can be predicted and controlled. This should not give objects a bad name. They can make children feel safe, valuable, and part of something larger than themselves. They are points of entry to transformative experiences, experiences that often emerge as they are shared.

If we attend to young scientists' romance with objects, we are encouraged to make children comfortable with the idea that falling in love with things is part of what we expect of them. We are encouraged to introduce the periodic table as poetry and LEGOs as a form of art.

Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT.

Like Charles Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck suggested that living organisms are products of a long process of transformation. But instead of asserting, as Darwin did, that diversity emerges through the natural selection and accumulation of heritable variations over time, Lamarck proposed two mechanisms of evolutionary change: an inherent tendency in living matter to become increasingly more complex and the inheritance of acquired characteristics &mdash environmentally induced or learned individual adaptations that accrue over time and pass to offspring. Many biologists at the time, including Darwin himself, believed such "soft" inheritance was complementary to the theory of natural selection.

Soft inheritance was passionately debated for decades but fell from favor in the 20th century with the forging of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis (MS), a version of Darwinism that unified the theory of natural selection with Mendelian genetics, and, later, the myriad discoveries from the midcentury molecular biology revolution of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. For the past 60 years, it has provided the theoretical basis for evolutionary studies.

Two major legal developments in the past few months are deepening a schism between leading primatologists, biologists, and ethicists around the world. A pending Spanish law that would grant unprecedented protections to great apes, and a recent extension to a Swiss law that protects the "dignity" of organisms, are the latest fronts in a battle to redefine the meaning of human rights, and indeed whether such rights are the exclusive domain of humans.

At the forefront of the battle is the Great Ape Project (GAP). Established in 1993, it demands a basic set of moral and legal rights for chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos, and orangutans. This June, GAP persuaded the Spanish Parliament's environmental committee to approve a resolution supporting those goals.

Other countries, including the United Kingdom and New Zealand, have taken steps to protect great apes from experimentation, but this is the first time that actual rights would be extended to apes. The resolution establishes a set of laws based on GAP's principles, which Spain promises to implement by the end of the year. Those laws would ban the use of apes in experiments or entertainment or commercial ventures, and they would set higher standards for their conditions in captivity. The message is clear: These animals are not property. "It's a historic breakthrough in reducing the barrier between humans and nonhuman animals," says Peter Singer, an Australian philosopher and the head of GAP.

On July 21, 1969, after landing in the Moon's Sea of Tranquility, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted an American flag and spent almost three hours exploring the lunar terrain. The Moon's airless, inert surface should preserve their footprints and equipment for millions of years. But new robotic rovers due to begin visiting the Moon next summer threaten to radically accelerate the site's decay, prompting preservationists to ask how best to protect off-world archaeological sites as the heritage of future generations.

The impetus behind the robotic voyage is the Google Lunar X Prize, which could pay $20 million or more to the first team to successfully land a rover on the Moon and accomplish a set list of tasks. Fourteen teams from around the world have registered, but only one, Astrobotic Technology, has publicly announced its planned itinerary: a trip to the Apollo 11 site next summer, shortly after the first mission's 40th anniversary. Astrobotic Tech representative David Gump says their rover will land far from the Apollo 11 site and will be able to recognize and circumvent footprints and artifacts on the lunar surface, but not everyone shares this op-timism. John Logsdon, director of George Washington University's Space Policy Institute, believes the team should first perform trial runs on Earth.

"I'd like to see them demonstrate their ability to do a precision landing someplace else before they try it next to the Apollo 11 site," Logsdon says. "You wouldn't have to be very far off to come down on top of the flag or something dramatic like that." Precision landings are further complicated by the fact that most sites are known to accuracies of only, at best, tens of meters. New Mexico State University anthropologist Beth O'Leary proposes that NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, launching this October, be used to survey these sites before any landings are attempted.

Spoken language is perhaps the most notable marker of our species. Our ability to call forth words with universal meaning is so natural that we take it for granted, and yet scientists still know very little about how it works, or from where the ability derives.

Because current neuroimaging technologies have relatively low resolution, it has been extremely difficult to study language in human subjects. Researchers have generally relied on observational models from linguistics to try to predict how the brain represents the meaning of words.

Recently, a team of researchers used a creative methodology to get past these technological hurdles by using a text corpus, a linguistics tool that shows how often certain words co-occur with other words. By combining information from the text corpus with previous fMRI data gathered while subjects thought of specific nouns, a model was able to predict patterns of brain computational activation with remarkable accuracy for words that had never before been imaged.

No one wants to be an architect because they're interested in the physics of nails and screws and glue and mortar. But as stirring as it can be to contemplate a great piece of architecture — it's easy to imagine Brunelleschi's excitement as he first contemplated the stunning dome he was to build on Florence's Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore — and as much fun as it can be to design a dream house, no architect will ever realize a vision without an understanding of how to join a structure's materials.

Biology has a similar problem. Much of modern developmental biology has a bias for grand visions of form and structure. Our major model organisms are creatures like fruit flies and mice and zebrafish, but these are the elaborate edifices of evolution, far out on the extreme edge of multicellular complexity. While it is both interesting and productive to study the grand patterns of development in producing such wonderful phenomena as the outline of the body plan in the expression of Hox genes, or the growth of limbs, or the functional anatomy and physiology of intricate sensory organs like the eye, these processes all hinge on the most fundamental pieces of ontogeny: the mechanisms by which cells can adhere, interact, and cooperate. These are the nails and glue of the development and evolution of multicellular organisms. And, just as Brunelleschi's greatest achievement began not with a grand plan, but with expert knowledge of the simple brick, we can better understand those processes if we look away from the mice and turn our eyes to simpler, humbler creatures, ones that have mastered the crucial skills of cellular masonry.

Multicellularity requires complex cell adhesion and signaling abilities — development and differentiation cannot occur without them. A multicellular organism is made up of cells that stick to one another with varying degrees of strength, which is mediated by an external coat of proteins and sugars that makes cells sticky in specific ways. In addition, cells secrete proteins and sugars that form a kind of fibrous goo called the extracellular matrix, to which they can also stick. When cell proteins bind to other cells or the extracellular matrix, the proteins trigger biochemical changes — the signaling part of the process — that can cause changes in cell metabolism, gene activity, cell shape, and physiology. These capabilities are fundamental to building a multicellular organism.

So where did they come from?

We cannot see farther into the universe because the big bang happened only 14 billion years ago and light from distant regions has not had enough time to reach Earth. Yet subtle clues are beginning to reveal some of the properties of the regions of space hidden beyond our cosmic horizon. Our world appears to be only a small part of a "multiverse," an expanse vastly larger than the visible universe, and for the most part completely different from it.

To account for what we do see, cosmologists invented a theory many years ago called "inflation," in which a brief, ultra-accelerated expansion of the early universe stretched space to a size far greater than what we observe. Inflation explains why, despite the violence of the big bang, the universe appears to us uniform and smooth, and the theory has made predictions confirmed by measurements of subtle variations in the radiation left over from the big bang. But inflation does not really make the universe more uniform — just huge. If inflation is correct, then the billions of light-years that our telescopes probe are a mere dot on a far vaster canvas.

The multiverse comprises a large number of distinct patches, each far bigger than our night sky. What observers see, therefore, also depends on where they find themselves. Most of the regions in the multiverse are inhospitable to life, and their properties will not be observed. But what exactly is life? In order to extract predictions from the multiverse, my colleagues and I have developed a statistical tool to find regions with observers: We look not for life itself but for the disorder left behind by the complex processes that its formation depends on. To understand the physical signatures of life in this way may help us finally to comprehend our own little corner of the multiverse.

The homeostatic framework has long dominated the study of bacteria and microbiology, asserting that bacteria change their behavior based on the information they receive from their local environment. Researchers know, for example, that when E. coli bacteria enter the gut — an environment lacking oxygen — they switch to a form of anaerobic respiration in order to survive.

But there is a fundamental problem for any organism that behaves only by reacting to its environment after the fact: The behavior is not very efficient. If bacteria had the ability to use environmental cues to plan for future changes, the transition would be far smoother, and their survival more assured.

A group of microbiologists studying E. coli recently noted that before entering the deoxygenated gut, the bacteria enter the mouth and experience a rise in temperature. When the researchers exposed the bacteria to a similar increase in temperature, as if in anticipation of entering the gut, they found that E. coli turned to anaerobic respiration even without oxygen deprivation.

When the previous generation of life scientists was coming up through the academy, there was a widespread assumption, not always articulated by professors, that human evolution had all but stopped. It had certainly shaped our prehuman ancestors — Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and the rest of the ape-men and man-apes in our bushy lineage — but once Homo sapiens developed agriculture and language, it was thought, we stopped changing. It was as though, having achieved its aim by the seventh day, evolution rested. "That was the stereotype that I learned," says population geneticist and anthropologist Henry Harpending. "We showed up 45,000 years ago and haven't changed since then."

The idea makes a rough-and-ready kind of sense. Natural selection derives its power to transform from the survival of some and the demise of others, and from differential reproductive success. But we nurse our sick back to health, and mating is no longer a privilege that males beat each other senseless to secure. As a result, even the less fit get to pass on their genes. Promiscuity and sperm competition have given way to spiritual love; the fittest and the unfit are treated as equals, and equally flourish. With the advent of culture and our fine sensibilities, the assumption was, natural selection went by the board.

Moreover, evolution had never been observed in humans, except in a few odd cases, so the conclusion was drawn that it wasn't happening. One can't fault the logic. The most famous case of adaptive change in humans, that of sickle cell trait as an evolutionary response to malaria, seemed to prove the point that human evolution must be rare: Even in as dire and malaria-stricken an environment as West Africa, the only response evolution has been able to come up with is an imperfect defense that can cause serious health problems along with its solitary benefit. Selection pressures as strong as those brought about by endemic malaria are uncommon, and civilization was thought to wash out those less powerful.

This past January, at the St. Innocent Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Anchorage, Alaska, friends and relatives gathered to bid their last farewell to Marie Smith Jones, a beloved matriarch of her community. At 89 years old, she was the last fluent speaker of the Eyak language. In May 2007 a cavalry of the Janjaweed — the notorious Sudanese militia responsible for the ongoing genocide of the indigenous people of Darfur — made its way across the border into neighboring Chad. They were hunting for 1.5 tons of confiscated ivory, worth nearly $1.5 million, locked in a storeroom in Zakouma National Park. Around the same time, a wave of mysterious frog disappearances that had been confounding herpetologists worldwide spread to the US Pacific Northwest. It was soon discovered that Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, a deadly fungus native to southern Africa, had found its way via such routes as the overseas trade in frog's legs to Central America, South America, Australia, and now the United States. One year later, food riots broke out across the island nation of Haiti, leaving at least five people dead; as food prices soared, similar violence erupted in Mexico, Bangladesh, Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ethiopia.

All these seemingly disconnected events are the symptoms, you could say, of a global epidemic of sameness. It has no precise parameters, but wherever its shadow falls, it leaves the landscape monochromatic, monocultural, and homogeneous. Even before we've been able to take stock of the enormous diversity that today exists — from undescribed microbes to undocumented tongues — this epidemic carries away an entire human language every two weeks, destroys a domesticated food-crop variety every six hours, and kills off an entire species every few minutes. The fallout isn't merely an assault to our aesthetic or even ethical values: As cultures and languages vanish, along with them go vast and ancient storehouses of accumulated knowledge. And as species disappear, along with them go not just valuable genetic resources, but critical links in complex ecological webs.

Experts have long recognized the perils of biological and cultural extinctions. But they've only just begun to see them as different facets of the same phenomenon, and to tease out the myriad ways in which social and natural systems interact. Catalyzed in part by the urgency that climate change has brought to all matters environmental, two progressive movements, incubating already for decades, have recently emerged into fuller view. Joining natural and social scientists from a wide range of disciplines and policy arenas, these initiatives are today working to connect the dots between ethnosphere and biosphere in a way that is rapidly leaving behind old unilateral approaches to conservation. Efforts to stanch extinctions of linguistic, cultural, and biological life have yielded a "biocultural" perspective that integrates the three. Efforts to understand the value of diversity in a complex systems framework have matured into a science of "resilience." On parallel paths, though with different emphases, different lexicons, and only slightly overlapping clouds of experts, these emergent paradigms have created space for a fresh struggle with the tough questions: What kinds of diversity must we consider, and how do we measure them on local, regional, and global scales? Can diversity be buffered against the streamlining pressures of economic growth? How much diversity is enough? From a recent biocultural diversity symposium in New York City to the first ever global discussion of resilience in Stockholm, these burgeoning movements are joining biologist with anthropologist, scientist with storyteller, in building a new framework to describe how, why, and what to sustain.