FE5.2 - Spiders Song (Part 2) - Future Ecologies

Episode Transcript
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Introduction Voiceover (00:02):
You are listening to season five of
Future Ecologies.

Mendel Skulski (00:05):
Before we start the show, we want to send a huge
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(00:52):
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futureecologies.net/patronsOkay, that's all. On to part two

(01:18):
of Spiders Song.
Welcome back. My name is Mendel.

Adam Huggins (01:27):
And I'm Adam.

And this is Future Ecologies. Today, in
Spiders Song Part Two, we'retaking our seats in the concert
hall of life — audience to thegrand dance of evolution, with
taxonomist, phylogenetictheoretician, and jumping spider
devotee Wayne Maddison.

Wayne Maddison (01:47):
Hi. Good to be back.

In other words, we are jumping in right where we
left off.

So do you want to give us a quick recap?

Sure. Jumping spiders are basically like tiny,
eight legged, big eyed cats,slash birds of paradise — in
that there are bedazzled malesthat court mates by dancing. And
also by singing! In a manner ofspeaking... they vibrate.

Yeah, go on.

And not only are their species really diverse in
shape, and color, they alsodemonstrate a lot of convergent
evolutionary patterns, which arenot limited to independently and
repeatedly developing colorvision, ever more complex
courtship rituals, a bunch ofthem have become ant-like, and
there's something going on withtheir Y chromosomes.

Yeah, mostly. The Y chromosome thing is
actually just the one genusHabronattus, not all jumping
spiders. But it'll be importantlater on, I promise.
Where we left off in Part One,Wayne was overcome by his sense

(03:01):
of awe — that evolution isn'tjust an endless chaos of
diversity. It seems to coherearound certain patterns, motifs,
melodies, themes and variations.It seemed to him like the
grandest possible symphony. Ifonly he could hear it.

And at first, I didn't know what to do with
that. But then I thought "Oh!I'm a computer programmer. I do
visualizations of change onphylogenetic trees. Why don't I
program a sonification of changeon trees?"

I'm assuming what a visualization is to our eyes,
a sonification would be to ourears.

Yeah. sonification is like
transmogrifying data into sound.In the same way that you might
turn that same data into agraph. Sonification is the
auditory equivalent.

So last episode, we were figuratively talking
about how evolution is a form ofmusic. And now you're talking
about literally makingevolutionary patterns into
music.

Yeah, exactly. So, this practice of
sonification has been used toexplore and communicate climate
data, X-ray astrophotography,prime numbers, and even

(04:40):
sequences of DNA itself.
But what Wayne is talking abouthere is sonifying a phylogeny —
an entire family tree of manyorganisms.

A phylogenetic tree is a statement about the
history of lineages in the past.And we can't actually go back in
a time machine and see thoselineages, so we have to
reconstruct it. And we canreconstruct it with lots of
data, occasionally throughfossils. But mostly nowadays, we
use genetic data to reconstructthese trees. And it's pretty

(05:21):
clear, we're doing a pretty goodjob of it, because we've got so
much data that's all speaking tothe same phylogenetic tree. But
nonetheless, it's still ahypothesis.

So to draw a phylogenetic tree, they have to
gather specimens, sample theirDNA, and assess them for
different characteristics, likewhich ones have Y chromosomes.
Then they use some of thestatistical tools that Wayne
developed to create an estimateof who branched off from who,

(05:50):
and what the characteristics ofthose ancestors were most likely
to be.

So like, if a scientist took you and me, they
could cast back and figure outwho our most recent common
ancestor was and what traitsthey might have had — based on
what you know about us, andmaybe some fossils.

And some DNA.

Yeah and a computer program. Okay.

Yeah. So so after they've done that, they
have a sequence of all thesedifferent lineages, starting
from a common root, and thenbranching and changing through
time.

But what would it sound like? Would we hear
harmonies would we hear melodiesclearly, and so forth? I didn't
know.

And as far as I could tell, although this world
of data sonification is growingreally rapidly, the sonification
of phylogeny is unprecedented.Wayne's experiment would be a
world first.

I wanted this to have some basis of reality. So I
started with a real dataset ofHabronattus.

Habronattus, also known as the paradise
jumping spiders, most of whichare native to North America. And
the characteristics examined bythat dataset were the various
sex chromosomes...

and the issues of the the chiasma localization.

... that is, that is not a term that I am familiar
with.

Okay, bear with me for one last piece of
cellular biology.
If we must.
Remember that you've got half ofyour chromosomes from each of
your parents, right?

Yes.

So well, most of the time, the chromosomes from
both contributors are paired up,but separate. But during
meiosis, the moment at whichsperm or eggs are being
produced, the DNA from each pairof chromosomes is shuffled
together, swapping the copies ofgenes from either parent. That's
the actual moment of geneticrecombination that gives you

(07:46):
variations.

Yeah, no, no, I'm, I am still with you.

So the chiasma is the crossover point along the
leg of the chromosome, wherethat swap takes place.

Got it! So if you're picturing these cute
little X chromosomes with theirlittle dancing legs, right, four
legs, it's like, where is thatspot where they cross over

And swap.

and swap their information. Yeah, okay.

Wayne had data that included the physical
measurements of where thechiasma was located for each of
these species of Habronattusjumping spiders. It might be
closer to the middle of thechromosome, or closer to the
end.

So we were looking for a correlation
between where the chiasmataoccurred along the chromosome
and the evolution of the Ychromosome. And at first glance,
you might think "Well, whyshould those even be connected?
It's not as if you needed thechiasmata in a place to generate
the Y." So they seemed like twodifferent aspects of the
chromosomes.

(08:41):
There had been a prediction thatthere should be some sort of
correlation in this case thatyou might expect to see when
there is a Y, the chiasmatawould be more towards the tips
of the chromosomes. So that wasbefore our study. And it turned
out that when we looked at it,that correlation is actually
there.

And in general, correlations like these are
exactly what evolutionarybiologists are looking for —
puzzling out why when onefeature is like this, another
feature tends to be like that.So Wayne decided to sonify this
family tree of Habronattusjumping spiders, comparing the

(09:24):
location of their chiasmata withthe evolution of a new Y
chromosome.

So here's how it turned out. First, let's just
focus on the speciation eventsthose points where lineages
diverge. Every time you hear atone, that's a spider lineage
splitting in two.

(09:52):
The next layer has to do withthe chiasmata, where they are in
the chromosomes. And becausewhere they are in the
chromosomes is variable, likeit's a continuous variable,
you're gonna hear the tone goingup and down in different amounts
as the chiasmata slide up ordown.

(10:14):
So, you know, at this point, I'mthinking "Hmm, I'm not... I'm
not really hearing any grandsymphonies yet, it's sort of
intriguing, but it's notsounding particularly orderly to
me." But, you know, I went aheadand tried it now with the Y
chromosomes. So here, you'regoing to hear a little ping,

(10:35):
every time a Y chromosomeevolves, and a second little
ping a different sort, if itactually reverses back to loss
of Y.
And now, here are all of them —the speciation events,

(10:55):
charismata, and the Y chromosome— all together.
I mean, I have heard 20thcentury classical music that

(11:17):
sounded a little bit like that,but it really wasn't the
symphony that I was expecting.

I mean, I think I enjoyed that, because I have a
love of John Carpenter horrormovies from like the 70s, and
80s, and 90s.

And looking back, I can see that there were
a few things wrong with it. Thefirst being how it starts
slowly, and then gets busier andbusier and busier, as if
suddenly all sorts of extrathings are happening.

Like it just gets exponentially louder and
denser, until it suddenly ends —which isn't really the shape of
most music that we tend tolisten to.

No, not not mostly no.

So why do you think the data sounded like
that?

Well, speciation, right? Evolution tends to become
more complex over time. All ofthe phylogenetic trees that I
have ever seen begin with asingle line, and split and split
and split and split and splituntil you've got an exponential
number more species than whenyou started. So yeah, it makes

(12:21):
perfect sense.

But remember that these trees are constructed
by calculating back from speciesthat are still around today. So
what's missing?

I mean, we're missing all of the spiders that
have gone extinct.

Bingo.

Part of the problem with extinct lineages is
that we don't see them today. Sowe don't know exactly how many
there are in Habronattus. Andthere are no known fossils, it's
not like we can figure it outthat way. But we can get an
estimate of how many therelikely would have been. And so
one way to do this is to do asimulation of the dynamics of

(12:58):
branching and extinction. And wecan sort of populate all those
lower parts of the tree wherethings went extinct. And that
would make it so that it wasmore even in terms of the
busyness all the way through.

And if you you know, if you were to simulate
those extinct lineages, itraises questions about whether
you'd want to be able to hearthe difference between the real
and the imaginary ones. And inthe end, with all of the various
branches, you still have to dealwith a lot of overlapping sound.

The second thing that's wrong, well, there's
probably more than one here. Butthe second thing that's wrong is
that you're not able to reallyhear each of the voices and the
melody that it might be playing,because I'm using the same set
of notes all through the wholetree. And that what I really
needed to have done was somehowdistinguish all these voices so
that you could hear themseparately. So it was almost

(13:51):
like I should have said, okay,at the base of the tree at the
root, there was a divergenceevent. And that split between
the woodwinds and the strings,for instance. And then on the
lineage of strings, it splitagain between the bass and all
the smaller ones, and likewiseon the woodwinds. And that
perhaps, if you had it so thatthe voices were distinguishable,

(14:13):
you could hear them asdifferent, then you could more
easily hear the little melodiesthat were happening as chiasmata
and Y chromosome evolutionfollowed each other. But I
realized, "Oh, this is going totake a lot more work than I'm
ready to do." There were lots ofspiders waiting for me to study
them.

And so, four years ago, that's basically
where the story would have ended— with a beautiful metaphor, and
a not quite as beautifulsonification. And I wasn't
satisfied with that.
"I... I was wondering...
so I asked Wayne, if I couldtake my own spin at it.

(14:55):
"And sort of try to take it tothe next step as part of this
project."

Sure, I think that could be fun.

And so I tried. But after a few very
enthusiastic but ultimatelyfalse starts, I too realized
that this was a way biggerproject than I had anticipated.
Not least because at the time I,I didn't really know anything
about making music. But it wasthis project that was my

(15:25):
motivation to learn. And evenwhile this project was on the
backburner, I fell in love withlearning the patterns of music,
and with the principles ofelectronic synthesis. I fell in
love with making music just forits own sake.

I enjoy listening to the music you make.

Thank you. You know, looking back, I would say
that this was one of my DivideCreek moments. Like this story,
put me on a path. And I thinkI'll be on it for the rest of my
life.

I know that feeling. Yeah.

But the other part was that in order to make
it happen, I needed help. Infact, I needed a whole team.

Mendel that's called a band.

Well, allow me to introduce Duncan Geere.

Duncan Geere (16:20):
Hello, what's up party people?

And Miriam Quick.

Miriam Quick (16:24):
The previous slide where we have the phylogenetic
tree, does the horizontal axisrepresent time on a linear
scale? Or does it represent someother degree of change,

Duncan and Miriam are information
designers, and they're the hostsof a really wonderful podcast
that's completely dedicated todata sonification. That's called
Loud Numbers. Next,

Damien de Vienne (16:47):
There must have been a molecular clock.

This is Damian de Vienne, evolutionary
biologist at the University ofLyon.

Damien de Vienne (16:55):
So you have a branch length usually represent
the number of mutations thatoccur along these branch. And
then if you have a hypothesis ofhow fast mutation accumulates,
then you can transform that totime,

I did actually end up finding one other
precedent for phylogeneticsonification after Wayne's
original attempt. It wasn'texactly a piece of music, but
more like a proof of concept.Damien was a co author, along
with his friend, Henri,

Henri Boutin (17:27):
We've done a little batch in pure data, which
was sort of a test just to seeif it's possible to sonify trees

This is Henri Boutin, acoustic researcher at
like that.
IRCAM. That proof of conceptthat I found was really just a
side project between him andDamien.

Henri Boutin (17:42):
We are friends since a lot of time. We used to
do music and things like that.But we've never, we've never
worked together. And this wasthe first opportunity to work
together.

And finally, local wizard slash generative
music researcher and PhDstudent, Simon Overstall.

Simon Overstall (18:04):
Good morning.

Who joined me in Pacific timezone solidarity
whenever we met with ourEuropean collaborators.

Simon Overstall (18:13):
I need another coffee now.

So what did you do with this incredible team of
people?

Well, I think it's probably better if I spare
you the prototypes and themeetings and the revisions, I'll
just jump straight to what weended up with. Because just like
Wayne's version, I'm going toneed to explain what you're
about to hear.

Yeah, all of the all of the best music requires
extensive exposition, and I amhere for it.

Well, in this case, yes.

I'm all ears.

So here we're using the same underlying data
as Wayne. We've got thesespecies of Habronattus jumping
spiders, we know the location oftheir chiasmata and whether or
not they have Y chromosomes. Butthe difference between our
interpretations starts with howwe represent time.

Okay.

The tree itself is the same, and we're not
simulating any extinct species.We're just approaching playback
in kind of a different way.

But what do you mean by that?

So time still flows from the past to the
present. But to avoid thatexponential cacophony of all the
parallel branches, we decidednot to play all the lineages at
the same time,

Ah that makes sense. So what did you do
instead?

You can kind of think about it as a series of
Divide Creeks. We always startat the same place, like the
headwaters of the stream, theroot of the tree.

The last common ancestor between all of these
species

Yeah, exactly. So we follow that one lineage
until at some point, it splitsin two. Then we follow those two
branches. until they both reachthe present day. And because the
scaling of time by branch lengthisn't linear, one branch will
probably reach its end beforethe other one. But once they've

(20:11):
both finished, we pause andcycle back to the beginning.

So it's basically that they're just two
voices at any single point. Gotit. Okay.

And each of these trips from the root to the
two tips, representsapproximately 5 million years of
evolution.

Wow. Okay. And how long does it take in like real
time.

It kind of depends on which branch are
listening to, but a few secondsto tens of seconds.

Got it.

Now, because we're only listening to the
branches of this tree one pairat a time, it takes a lot longer
to hear the whole thing. But Ialso think that makes it a lot
more musical.

Sure. But what are we actually hearing as we move
down the creek? So to speak.

So every time a lineage reaches a point of
speciation, where its path mighthave gone one way or another, it
plays a chord. Or moreprecisely, it plays an arpeggio.
Which is like a chord with allthe notes spread out. And the

(21:21):
notes that are in that arpeggiodepend on which daughter lineage
our current branch followed,either descending to the right
or to the left along the tree.

What do right and left mean in this situation?

So when you're drawing a phylogenetic tree, the
order of the branches, andreally what's left and what's
right... it's all pretty mucharbitrary. So this is just a way
of having a simple rule aboutthe pitch of the notes that
makes each unique branchingpath, a unique melody.

Okay, yeah, left, right, one way, the other way.

One way, the other way.

And so each unique species plays out as a unique
series of notes.

Yeah. Yeah, they all start in the same place, but
eventually find themselvessomewhere different.

So what is the rule? What are the actual notes
in that melody? What do theymean?

Well, the chord that you'll hear the arpeggio is
only ever at most four notes.And that's telling the story of
four generations. So the greatgreat grandmother note is
forgotten. And the daughter noteis added. Depending on that,
quote, unquote, direction ofdescendants, a daughter note
might be either a minor seventhabove the pitch of its mother.

(22:45):
Or a perfect fifth below.

Okay, so as we go, we forget a little bit about our
ancestors. We may not knowexactly what those species were,
or what their names were or whattheir dances were like.

Yeah. But we do still have some sense of where
we came from.

Yeah.

Who we came from.

Yeah.

Also, it's important that I point out that
the arpeggio isn't in order ofoldest to youngest, it's just in
note order, either going up ordown.

And if it's descending or ascending, then it
just gets put in its place.Okay.

And to keep things musical, the notes will
wrap to a four octave range.

Okay.

But the melody isn't actually the important
part.

That's what drummers tell me.

It's true. So in this case, it's really just
describing the shape of thetree. What we're trying to hear
is a correlation in the data, aconnection between the evolution
of a Y chromosome and thelocation of the chiasmata —
these two seemingly unconnectedaspects of jumping spider
biology.

Oh, yeah. Okay.

So what I want you to pay attention to is the
envelope of each note. That is,the shape of the sound — either
short, and plucky or long andsustained.

Right. Waaauwww. And what does the envelope tell
us?

That's the position of the chiasmata, those
crossover points on thechromosomes. The closer the
chiasma gets to the tip of thechromosome, the pluckier the
note.

Got it.

And the evolution of a new Y chromosome
is signaled by a few things asthey arrive along the branch.
What you'll first hear is atriangle ringing out.
Then when you hear the arpeggio,you'll notice that the direction
will change from ascending todescending. So what I want you

(24:53):
to listen for is how often pluckyour notes are arranged in a
descending arpeggio.
Remember the sound of a triangleis your cue that a Y chromosome
has arrived.

Okay. Will there be a quiz at the end?

No, you can just enjoy yourself.

Okay.

Anyhow, that's, that's the main correlation that
we were trying to listen for.But we didn't stop there. Next
we took Wayne's suggestion thatthe voices really ought to
evolve more than just in termsof melody, but also, timbre,

Timbre, so like the character of the sound. So
do they split into like thestrings and the woodwinds? And
so on and so forth?

Well, not exactly.

So what I gather from all of that... is that
things are changing.

That's the case. The more the spiders mutate, the
more they sound like differentinstruments. And this is
actually like a way ofdescribing the evolutionary
distance along a branch. And onething I find interesting is how
suddenly these changes cansometimes happen. It could be an
artifact of how we've processedthe data. But it also seems that

(26:27):
evolution can be a lot lessgradual than we usually expect.

Yeah, that reminds me of a concept that we call
punctuated equilibrium, which isjust that, like in evolution,
things sort of can stay verystable for quite some time. And
then suddenly, there's a bunchof fairly large changes, right?
The environment shifteddramatically in some way or

(26:53):
there was a development of somekind of mutation. And everything
happens all at once.

Exactly, yeah, it kind of comes out of nowhere.
And another kind of subtle thingyou might notice is that where
the voices are positioned instereo, mimics their location on
the tree. So you'll hear themmoving around your head, as they
follow their branches, getting alittle quieter as they go out
towards the tips.

Of course, of course, stereo can be part of
this, I didn't think of that.

So I hope you're wearing headphones.

Never listen to Future Ecologies without your
headphones.

We really appreciate it.
Lastly, to mark time, betweeneach cycle of dividing creeks,
before we return to the root ofthe tree, you'll hear a short
clip of one of our spiderfriends singing.
We processed that through asynthesizer that models the
physics of a plucked string,providing a kind of drone for

(28:02):
the entire piece — as though thespiders themselves are
strumming.

So this is the spider playing a guitar, so to
speak. Wow.

That's majestic. I... I love that.

And now, Spiders Song, take two, in its entirety.

That is really cool. It's... it's really
beautiful. That's not at allwhat I would have expected. The
sense of how how rich are thespiders in these lineages comes
across, you know, it's it'snot... it's... the multi

(35:00):
dimensionality of it becomesclear, right of all of this.

I feel like I want a whole collection of different
phylogenies sonified like this,and just put them on and let my
brain simmer

The thing that I'm trying to locate is whether
or not the pings... how they'reconnected with one another, and
they're occasional enough thatit's hard to find them. Right,
that could just be because thedata is not showing it clearly.
But the other thing is, then Ialso felt like, it was the sort
of thing just like any music —that there's a little bit of a

(35:50):
learning process as to how tohear a new sort of music, where
you start to be able to noticethe pattern that you hadn't
noticed before, which actuallyis a lot like the way science
works, right? You know, you getstarted and you think that
there's no pattern there. Andit's actually just that you're
not used to seeing it.

(36:15):
Thing about using statistics isthat if you have the right sort
of data, lots of it, than youalmost don't need statistics,
because it just like "well,there it is." But the more
subtle is the pattern, the fewerthe replicates there are, the
more that processing andexamining and sifting is

(36:36):
important to be able to actuallyrecognize that signal there. And
I think in this case, yeah,there's probably a pattern here
between sex chromosome evolutionand chiasma localization, but
it's not a ton of replicates.And it's just two features
talking to one another, so tospeak.
On the other hand, that's whenif you had something like, you

(36:57):
know, DNA sequence data acrossthe genome or something, there's
probably a way to do it like,yeah, you'd still have to think
a lot about how to turn it intosound. But there are probably
things that once you get theright way to do it, you don't
need to learn anything to beable to hear the patterns,
right? It'll just jump right outat you.

So is that a symphony? No. And I think that's
okay. This isn't supposed to bethe way we listen to phylogeny,
to the music of evolution. It'sjust a few ideas for how we
could. And if you want to buildon this one, I'm making the
whole patch open-source. That'llbe up on our website,

futureecologies.net
I can't wait to hear some spiderremixes, or even some other
phylogenies put through thissystem.

Me neither. But, you know, maybe first, it's
worth asking, what's the pointof this whole exercise?

I can totally be the person that asked that,
Mendel. What is the point?

So I guess I just want to make a distinction
that there are really two bigtypes of sonification. And
across all of them, the goal isalways to get the data to speak.
But in my case, the key is thatI already knew the story that I
wanted to tell. And I wanted itto sound good, right? I wanted

(38:32):
it to be at least a littlemusical.

You wanted to tell a story and you wanted it to
sound good, which is why youmake a podcast, presumably.

That's why we're here! And the data were going to
be there no matter what, right?And I realized that being able
to really hear them, to hear themeaning and the patterns was so
dependent on how I... how Ituned the whole system towards
those. But if I were actuallytrying to do science, to

(39:04):
discover something new, it wouldhave been a completely different
exercise. And that's really thedifference between the
explanatory and the exploratory.

So yeah, it sounds like, you know, to me that you
were interested in thechallenge. You were interested
in developing your skillsmusically. And you were
interested in telling thisreally interesting story.

Yeah.

But, you know, devil's advocate over here. Does
this have any scientificutility, like, could data
sonification for phylogeny beuseful?

For a lot of things we are still in an
exploratory mode, and we don'thave the hypotheses yet there.
And, you know, maybe it'll turnout that you somehow tweak this
so that it handles genomes in aparticular way, and it's
something to do with, I don'tknow the shapes of proteins or
something like that. And youstart playing it, and people

(40:02):
start noticing patterns from theway it sounds that then turn
into testable ideas in thelaboratory. And you could see
that with with genomic data asbeing a distinct possibility!
You know, in your sonification,like, just as with all science,
there has to be a little bit ofimposition of our ideas. Because
if we don't have ideas thatwe're slightly imposing on

(40:24):
nature, we can't even make senseof it all, right? It's like,
this is a dialogue between thetelling and the listening. And
you don't want to go too far,you don't want to have it to be
on your head — the set of ideas,or just your hypotheses with no
grounding, no listening to whatnature is trying to tell us. But
you have to do that to someextent. And when the data are a
little bit sparse, or naturehasn't given you a lot of

(40:46):
replicates or something likethat, yeah, then you're going to
be able to hear your own voice alittle bit more strongly, and
nature's a little bit less. Whenyou got tons of data, or there's
a really strong pattern there,then your voice is going to
start to fade a little bit, asit should, and you're going to
hear nature speak more clearly.But it's always going to be a
balance.
And you know, we can't removeourselves from science, the

(41:08):
observer is always there. Thepreconceptions that the observer
has, will always be there. Buthopefully, there'll be enough
listening that nature's alwaysthere whispering, to keep us at
least somewhat connected toreality.

This is, I don't know if it's tangent, but I
studied experimental film as myundergrad. I'm a film school
dropout. And I lovedexperimental film, not because I
would stare at it really hard.And think about it really hard.
And try to derive the meaningfrom all of the kind of madness

(41:48):
up there on the screen. No, Iwould sit there watching those
films, often late at night, in alecture hall with very few
people in it. And I would justlet them wash over me and allow
them to do things to my brainthat other narrative, cinema
couldn't do, right? Because it'sso programmed to tell you this

(42:11):
particular thing, or thatparticular thing. And I liked
that about this, that, you know,somebody has put effort
obviously into into making itbeautiful, and to making it
comprehensible to us. Butthere's a lot of meaning in
there. And it's not at all clearexactly what it is from the
jump, you have to let it washover you. And maybe we'll learn

(42:33):
something about the phylogeny ofjumping spiders. Or maybe what,
you know, jumps out at us willbe something entirely different.
Thank you for giving me theopportunity to be my brain in
the music of jumping spiders.

You're welcome. And yeah, the science is just
one part of it. I felt like myjob was to honor the beauty of
these little spiders.

They are quite beautiful. I guess that raises
the question like these spidershave presumably evolved all of
these things to appeal to oneanother. Why do you think that
they're so captivating to us aswell?

At some level, it's a coincidence, right? Like,
it's just happenstance thatfemale jumping spiders seem to
respond to the same sort ofthings that we do, right, like
flashy colors, and interestingvibrations, just like us. So
male jumping spiders haveevolved to be dazzling —
dazzling in ways that appeal toboth of us. And I think, over

(43:42):
evolutionary time, jumpingspiders are literally being
shaped by you might say, theirown attention to beauty.

You know, science is typically defined by
the very rigorous style oftesting that we do. But there's
the other half of that, which isthe generation of ideas that we
then subsequently test. And thatgeneration of ideas doesn't have
to come in any rigorous way itcan come from anything. And an
attention to beauty, that'sjostling the way we look at the

(44:13):
world. It's giving us surprises,it's helping us to notice things
that we would have nevernoticed. An attention to beauty
may make us think about naturein ways that generate... that
generate new ideas that we canthen test, right. It's a source
of the creativity that allowsscience to proceed. So that
actually has a benefit ondiscovering truth.

(44:37):
Most things that I'vediscovered, either about the
spiders themselves, or about howwe approach nature as
scientists, the methods we use,those have useful consequences.
You know, we'll learn about howthe world works and that can
help us survive in fact. But alot of my pursuit of science is
connected with this pursuit ofbeauty. It's... it's a

(44:58):
motivation. It's... in someways, it's almost as if the
science is a byproduct.
You know, I fell in love withthe beauty of the world. When I
looked at that jumping spider,Phiddy, I saw a part of myself
there, there was a sense ofsomething in common. And I know
that I fell in love first with ajumping spider. But I also know

(45:18):
it could have been somethingelse, it could have been a
fungus, it could have been abeetle, it could have been an
earthworm. I think if you lookclosely enough, you can really
fall in love with just aboutanything.

(45:41):
As I've gone around the world,and found these amazingly
beautiful spiders, many of whichI know are not yet described by
scientists, I wonder, "Am I thefirst person to see this sort of
spider? Like, has anybody everlooked at this sort of spider
before." But at the same time,as I do that, I also wonder, "Am
I going to be the last to seethem alive?" Because many of the

(46:04):
environments that we have outthere are disappearing, the
forests are being cut down,habitat loss, and now climate
change is having an effecteverywhere. As a scientist, I
think the loss of the species isa loss of data, of course — like
we won't be able to learn fromthem anymore. But it's also
simply a loss of beauty.

(46:25):
You know, you have to thinkabout how we're going to turn
that around. And we could say,well, we need to do it because
of this. And we could sort ofimpose a sense of morally we
need to do this. But I don'tthink people tend to respond
well to an imposed ethics likethat. In fact, I tend to think
that we don't choose what wewant to do by our ethics, we

(46:46):
tend to retrofit our ethics towhat we want to do. So if we're
really going to change theworld, we have to basically
change what we care about,change our desires. We have to
fall in love with the planet. Wehave to fall in love with all
the beauty that's here. So as ascientist, I feel I have a moral
responsibility, not just to talkabout results, but to talk about
beauty. I have to talk aboutmore than the truths that I

(47:09):
uncover.

For all of us, scientists, musicians, and maybe
even jumping spiders — our senseof beauty is part of our
intrinsic motivation. Each ofus, in our own way, witnesses
the world, and responds to it.Because there is no such thing

(47:36):
as beauty without an audience.
This series of Future Ecologieswas produced by me, Mendel
Skulski, but not without helpfrom so many others. Thanks to

(47:57):
my amazing sonificationcollaborators, Damien de Vienne,
Miriam Quick, Duncan Geere,Simon Overstall, and Henri
Boutin. And if you're into thissort of thing, then you'll love
Duncan and Miriam's podcast,Loud Numbers.
Thanks, of course, to my cohost, Adam Huggins and our
guest, Wayne Maddison. Oursonification was produced in

(48:22):
Max/MSP using phylogenetic datagathered by Wayne Maddison and
Dr. Genevieve Leduc-Robert. Forthe source code, the full length
track, and to learn more abouthow it works, head to
futureecologies.net.
All of our supporters on Patreonwill be getting even more behind
the scenes and other bonuscontent. To get access, join our

(48:46):
community atpatreon.com/futureecologies.
All the jumping spider audiorecordings you heard came
courtesy of Dr. Damian Elias andhis lab at UC Berkeley.
Sonification examples came fromChris Chafe, the Chandra X-Ray
Observatory, Mark Evanstein, andMark Temple.

(49:09):
Special thanks to Ruby Singh,Vincent van Haaff, Teo Kaye,
Erin Robinsong, Cait Hurley,Kieran Fanning, and to Lobe
Spatial Sound Studio — Kate deLorme, Hannah Acton, Ian Wyatt,
Eric Chad, and Sev Shaban. Andthanks to Leya Tess for the

(49:29):
amazing illustrations.
Funding for this series wasprovided by the Canada Council
for the Arts. But ongoingsupport for this podcast comes
from listeners just like you. Tokeep this show going. join our
community atpatreon.com/futureecologies. And

(49:50):
if you like what we're doing,please just spread the word. It
really helps.
Till next time, thanks forlistening.

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FE5.2 - Spiders Song (Part 2)

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}FE5.2 - Spiders Song (Part 2)