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William H. Calvin
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON   98195-1800   USA
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The River That Flows Uphill (Sierra Club Books 1987) is my river diary of a two-week whitewater trip through the bottom of the Grand Canyon, discussing everything from the Big Bang to the Big Brain. It became a bestseller in German translation in 1995. AVAILABILITY limited; the US edition is now out of print. There are German and Dutch translations in print.
The River That Flows Uphill
A Journey from the Big Bang
to the Big Brain

Copyright 1986 by William H. Calvin.

You may download this for personal reading but may not redistribute or archive without permission (exception: teachers should feel free to print out a chapter and photocopy it for students).

END NOTES and BIBLIOGRAPHY

THE RIVER

John Blaustein, Edward Abbey, and Martin Litton. The Hidden Canyon: A River Journey, Viking, New York (1977; 1978 Penguin softcover edition). A superb collection of river pictures by boatman-photographer John Blaustein, with a river diary by Ed Abbey and introduction by Martin Litton.

Robert O. Collins and Roderick Nash, with photographs by John Blaustein. The Big Drops: Ten Legendary Rapids. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco (1978).

W. Kenneth Hamblin and J. Keith Rigby, Guidebook to the Colorado River, parts 1 and 2. Brigham Young University Geology Studies, Provo, Utah (1968). This is the mile-by-mile description of the Grand Canyon geological features seen from the river.

François Leydet. Time and the River Flowing: Grand Canyon. Sierra Club/Ballantine abridged edition (1968).

John Wesley Powell (1869 diary) and Eliot Porter (1969 photographs). Down the Colorado. Promontory Press (1969).

Larry Stevens, The Colorado River in Grand Canyon: A Comprehensive Guide to its Natural and Human History, Red Lake Books, P.O. Box 1315, Flagstaff AZ 86002 (Second Edition, 1984). The best of the river guidebooks, a work of love by a biologist-boatman.

THE CANYON

Harvey Butchart, Grand Canyon Treks. La Siesta Press, Glendale (1976). Together with Treks II and III, the major resource for off-the-beaten-path hiking and climbing routes in the Canyon.

Michael Collier, An Introduction to Grand Canyon Geology. Grand Canyon Natural History Association, Grand Canyon (1980). Another beautiful publication in the boatman tradition, this time by a geologist-boatman ("Boatmen will do anything for one more trip -- even graduate geology research").

Robert C. Euler and Frank Tikalsky, eds., The Grand Canyon: Up Close and Personal. Western Montana College Foundation (1980). A lovely collection of photographs and essays by experts on Canyon ecology, anthropology, geology, biology, river-running, and hiking. Available by mail (as are most other regional books listed here) from the bookstore of the Museum of Northern Arizona, Route 4, Box 720, Flagstaff, Arizona 86001, or Ken Sleight Books, Box 1270, Moab, Utah.

Paul F. Geerlings, Down the Grand Staircase. Grand Canyon Publications, Salt Lake City (1978).

Ron Redfern, Corridors of Time, Times Books, New York (1980).

POSTDAMNATION

Steven W. Carothers and Robert Dolan, "Dam changes on the Colorado River," Natural History 91(1):74-83 (1982).

Robert Dolan, A. Howard, and A. Gallenson, "Man's impact on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon," American Scientist 62:392-401 (1974).

Phillip L. Fradkin, A River No More: The Colorado River and the West. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, New York (1981).

"Water on the Plateau" is a special issue of Plateau, the publication of the Museum of Northern Arizona (Summer, 1981).

THE ANASAZI

J. Richard Ambler, The Anasazi. Museum of Northern Arizona Press, Flagstaff (1977). ."..the Anasazi...were slightly shorter than the average today, had straight black hair and spoke in tongues unintelligible to the western ear. They were people worried about their crops and children, remembering the past and wondering about the future."

Don D. Fowler, Robert C. Euler, and Catherine S. Fowler, "John Wesley Powell and the anthropology of the canyon country," Geological Survey professional paper 670, U.S. Geological Survey, Washington D.C. (1969). This summarizes the Anasazi ruins along the river corridor.

Alfonso Ortiz, editor, Handbook of North American Indians, volume 9, Southwest. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (1979). Many chapters on both archaeology and present-day Pueblo Indians.

NOTES

Preface

Owen J. Flanagan, Jr., The Science of the Mind, MIT Press, Cambridge (1984), p.19.

"Neurophysiologists": Terminology describing brain researchers can be confusing; I recommend that the reader ignore it. But for those trying to figure out the specialties, here goes. A neuroscientist is a brain researcher; this includes neurobiologists but also research neurologists, psychiatrists, neurosurgeons, and neuropathologists. A neurobiologist is typically a neuroscientist outside the clinical areas, often with a biology or psychology background rather than a medical school one, typically with a Ph.D. degree rather than an M.D. (though psychiatrists doing research on invertebrates are usually also called neurobiologists). Within neurobiology, there are subdivisions by interests and methodological expertise. I am a neurophysiologist, more concerned with function than anatomy (vice versa for a neuroanatomist); in particular, I do theoretical work (making mathematical models, doing computer simulations, trying to piece together the big picture), though in the past I have primarily been known as an experimental neurophysiologist (studying the electrical properties of nerve cells, and how these cells encode and decode information). There are, of course, neuropsychologists, neurochemists, specialists in development, and many others within the neurosciences. None of these names should be taken too seriously, since many individual scientists are involved in several specialties. For example, since leaving physics, I have done comparative primate anatomy, comparative behavior, membrane biophysics of stochastic processes, comparative vertebrate and invertebrate neurophysiology, clinical neurophysiology on single human nerve cells in patients with epilepsy or pain problems; mathematical modeling at the membrane, whole-cell, circuit, and perceptual levels; and modeling of evolutionary processes related to brain size within prehuman evolution -- yet I still think of myself primarily as a neurophysiologist with a biophysical bent (probably because my Ph.D. was in physiology and biophysics). A similarly diverse story could be told for many neurobiologists -- though, I might add, most of the advances come from people who narrowly specialize, painstakingly developing the techniques that allow them to force the nervous system to yield unequivocal answers to precisely phrased questions.

Those who admire holistic approaches will find some examples in this book, but let me venture a caution: Holism is very hard to practice without reductionism, either your own or someone else's. If one is to see the forest for the trees, it helps to know that a tree is the appropriate building block out of which forests are constructed (blades of grass are not the units of a lawn, for example). For the forest of the brain, we're still trying to figure out the individual units of action and of information storage; see W. H. Calvin and K. Graubard, "Styles of neuronal computation." In The Neurosciences, Fourth Study Program, edited by F.O. Schmitt and F.G. Worden (MIT Press, 1979), chapter 29.

Prologue

"Mile-high ice," see Jonathan Weiner, "The Grimsel glacier," The Sciences (New York Academy of Sciences) 25(2):22-29 (March 1985).

An excellent illustration of the Marble Platform and Grand Canyon is in Redfern's Corridors of Time on pp.38-39 (the Marble Platform is unlabeled, but the Marble Canyon cuts through it). I will periodically note the pages in the various picture books to which the determined reader can refer for a color illustration of various views of the Grand Canyon.

Glynn Llywelyn Isaac, "Aspects of human evolution." In Essays on Evolution: A Darwin Centenary Volume (Cambridge University Press, 1983). His obituary appears in Nature 319:15 (2 January 1986).

Day 1

Mile 1 Front and back, bow and stern aren't so obvious when a boat is symmetrical. In rowboat terminology the boatman faces the stern because the pull stroke is more powerful than the push. I prefer symmetrical ferryboat terminology, where the end that the captain faces is defined as the "bow"; ever since Nathaniel T. Galloway developed the technique in 1897, the Canyon boatmen have run rapids looking where they're going, and using a push stroke to steer. In our boats, the luggage is piled in a big canvas bag in the front floor, creating additional ballast for crashing through waves with the bow. The rear has the mooring line and the bigger of the bailing buckets.

Mile 4 S.W. Janes, "The apparent use of rocks by a raven in nest defense." Condor 78:409 (1976).

Vultures bombing eggs: Jane Goodall, "Tool-using in primates and other vertebrates," Advances in the Study of Behaviour 3:195-249 (1970).

Mile 5 For a discussion of the origins of flight, see S.J. Gould, "Not necessarily a wing," Natural History 94:12 (October 1985); J.G. Kingsolver and M.A.R. Koehl, "Aerodynamics, thermoregulation, and the evolution of insect wings: differential scaling and evolutionary change," Evolution 39:488-504 (1985); and J.S. Edwards, "Predator evasion and the origin of insect flight: an exercise in evolutionary ethology," Society for Neuroscience Abstracts 152.10 (1985).

The gliding snake is Chrysopelea; see p.100 in David Attenborough's The Living Planet, Little Brown, Boston (1984).

Mile 8 Badger Rapid photos 10,11 in Blaustein; facing p.152 in Collins et al.

Mile 10 Actually, there are proposed evolutionary scenarios for laughter, most of which see it (as did Freud) as a form of aggression. See the review in Iren;auaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Krieg und Frieden, R. Piper Verlag, Munich (1975) (translated as The Biology of War and Peace, Viking Penguin, New York, 1979).

Mile 12 David Barash, The Whisperings Within: Evolution and the Origin of Human Nature. Harper and Row, New York (1979).

Mile 17 Glen Canyon references: See photos in Leydet, pp. 151-160; Powell and Porter, and in Eliot Porter, The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado, (1963).

Mile 18 E. J. Kollar and C. Fisher, "Tooth induction in chick epithelium: expression of quiescent genes for enamel synthesis," Science 207:993-995 (1980). Fossil footprints, see Mile 136 notes.

Mile 21 The Ursa major constellation usually known as the Big Dipper in North America is called the Casserole in France, the Plough in England, the Celestial Bureaucrat in China, and Revolving Male by the Navajo. See pp.46-47 in Carl Sagan's Cosmos, Random House, New York (1980).

Timothy Ferris, The Red Limit, William Morrow and Co., New York (1977). An excellent history of cosmology with a glossary of terms.

Eric Chaisson, Cosmic Dawn: The Origins and Matter and Life. Atlantic Monthly Press, Boston (1981).

Paul S. Henry, "A simple description of the 3;dgK cosmic microwave background." Science 207:939-942 (29 February 1980). For a history of the fossil photon discovery, see Jeremy Bernstein, "Three degrees above zero," New Yorker, pp. 42-70 (20 August 1984), or James S. Trefil, The Moment of Creation, Scribner's, New York (1983).

John McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York (1974).

Don Mathewson, "The clouds of Magellan," Scientific American 252(4):107-114 (April 1985).

Building heavier elements: Hans Bethe and Gerald Brown, "How a supernova explodes," Scientific American 252(5):60 (May 1985).

One recent, though tentative, estimate of the age of the universe is 13 billion years, the Hubble constant calibrated using the double image (produced by a gravitational lens effect) of a distant quasar with an 18-month lag between the two images because of different path lengths. See John Gribbin's news article, "A new way to date the universe," New Scientist, p.24 (7 March 1985).

The expansion of the universe after the Big Bang has always presented theorists with difficulties in accounting for the uniform directions of arrival of the fossil photons, but also for the nearly uniform distribution of matter in the universe. Notwithstanding the "empty space" between the Local Group and the Virgo Cluster, the universe is far too uniform on a larger scale to have arisen from a simple explosion scattering matter from a point source (like light intensity, the mass density would fall off). For a recent summary of theory, see Alan H. Guth and Paul J. Steinhardt, "The inflationary universe," Scientific American 250(5):116 (May 1984), and Andrei Linde, "The universe: Inflation out of chaos," New Scientist, p.14 (7 March 1985). John P. Huchra, Margaret J. Geller, and Val;aaerie de Lapparent (in the 1 March 1986 Astrophysical Journal Letters) note that galactic clusters lie at the intersections of large "bubbles" of empty space; in 1981, Jeremiah P. Ostriker and Lennox L. Cowie theorized that a bubble structure for the universe might have arisen from the shock waves of a series of supernovae explosions.

Day 2

Mile 21 North Canyon pool, photo 17 in Blaustein.

Mile 23 Layers of rock are illustrated in Redfern pp.36-37,66.

Mile 29 Silver Grotto first pool is shown following p.63 in Powell and Porter (but is misidentified).

Mile 30 The DDT story with the parachuting cats is in the late William T. Keeton's excellent text, Biological Science, Third Edition. W.W. Norton, New York (1980), p.854. While there are many good college biology texts, Keeton is also one of the best for reference purposes; the 4th edition will be edited by James Gould.

Mile 31 South Canyon petroglyphs are shown in photos 27 and 28 of Blaustein; "Sun Dagger" spirals, see notes for Mile 71.

Peter Farb, Man's Rise to Civilization: The Cultural Ascent of the Indians of North America, Second Edition, Dutton, New York (1978). The genetics is from W.F. Bodmer and L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, Genetics, Evolution, and Man, Freeman, San Francisco (1976).

Tom D. Dillehay, "Ice-age settlement in southern Chile," Scientific American 251(4):106 (October 1984).

J. White and J. O'Connell, A Prehistory of Australia, New Guinea, and Sahul. Sydney: Academia (1982).

Boats: J. Cherry, Proc. Prehist. Soc. 47:41 (1981).

Bering Strait not a barrier even at high sea levels, corridor open 13-14,000 years ago when grizzly bears came south: lecture by R. Dale Guthrie, "Ice age mammals and early man in Alaska," at the University of Washington, Seattle, 15 May 1984.

Taos epigram: Jeannette Henry, Vine Deloria, Jr., M. Scott Momaday, Bea Medicine, and Alfonzo Ortiz, editors, Indian Voices: The First Convocation of American Indian Scholars, The Indian Historical press, San Francisco, p.35 (1970).

Day 3

Mile 33 Vasey's Paradise, Redwall Cavern photos 19-21 in Blaustein. Euler and Tikalsky (p.37) and Redfern (p.152) show a split-twig figurine.

Aspirin and willows: See Gerald Weissman's column in Discover, pp.78-79 (February 1986).

Mile 35 River corridor near Nautiloid Canyon is shown in photo 22 of Blaustein. For an evolutionary tree of the nautiloids, see p.254 of G.L. Stebbins, Darwin to DNA, Molecules to Humanity, Freeman, San Francisco (1982).

Mile 39 John McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York (1971). For more on Colorado River dam building, see Fradkin (1981).

For more on beaver behavior, see L. Wilsson, My Beaver Colony, Doubleday, New York (1968), and Victor B. Scheffer, Spires of Form: Glimpses of Evolution, University of Washington Press, Seattle (1983), pp.33-35. The noise of running water was analyzed by L. Wilsson, "Observations and experiments on the ethology of the European beaver (Castor fiber L.), a study in the development of phylogenetically adapted behavior in a highly specialized mammal," Viltrevy, Swedish Wildlife 8:117-266 (1971). Since beavers do build dams in slowly flowing quiet water, it isn't just the noise of running water that stimulates them to build dams. As Scheffer notes, even more impressive is the beavers' ability to construct canals for barging in construction materials.

Eric Seaborg, "The battle for Hetch Hetchy." Sierra Club Bulletin 66(5):61 (November-December 1981).

Mile 41 Royal Arches, photo in Leydet, p.47.

Mile 47 Smart animals: see Euan M. Macphail, Brain and Intelligence in Vertebrates Clarendon Press, Oxford (1982).

Mile 52 View from Nankoweap granary trail is shown in photo 29 of Blaustein. Granary is Blaustein's #26, Redfern pp.156-157. Euler and Tikalsky (p.38) show the interior of a similar food cache.

Columbus discovering "Indians": Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers, Random House, New York (1983), reviews the surprisingly accurate (15 percent high) estimate of the Earth's circumference by Erastosthenes (276?-195? B.C.), the errors of Ptolemy (A.D. 90-168) in adopting a circumference 25 percent low and in greatly exaggerating the size of Asia, and how Ptolemy's map that shrank the unknown part of the world was adopted by the Europeans. Carl Sagan in Cosmos, Random House, New York (1980), pp.15-17, notes that Christopher Columbus in 1492 also cheated on his calculations of the distance sailing westward to India through the unknown portion of the earth, thereby minimizing the estimated distance to both his sponsors and those who risked their lives for his venture. This sales technique has since been adopted by the military-industrial complex, who now systematically underestimate the costs of their projected ventures (e.g., in the U.S. Navy in 1985, the average cost of a new ship was 63 percent higher than estimated).

Anasazi as astronomers: See John A. Eddy, "Archaeoastronomy in North America: Cliffs, mounds, and medicine wheels," chapter 4 In Search of Ancient Astronomies, edited by E.C. Krupp (Doubleday, New York, 1978); and Ray A. Williamson, Living the Sky: The Cosmos of the American Indian. Houghton Mifflin, Boston (1984).

J.C. Brandt, S.P. Maran, R. Williamson, R.S. Harrington, C. Cochran, M. Kennedy, W.J. Kennedy, and V.D. Chamberlain. "Possible rock art records of the Crab nebula supernova in the western United States." In: Archaeoastronomy in Pre-Columbian America, edited by A.F. Aveni, pp. 45-58. University of Texas Press, Austin (1975). Sagan's Cosmos has a photograph of the Chaco Canyon pictograph on p.232.

William C. Miller, "Two possible astronomical pictographs found in northern Arizona." Plateau 27(4):6-13 (1955).

David H. Clark and F. Richard Stephenson, The Historical Supernovae, Pergamon, Oxford (1977). Chapter 8 is on the Crab Nebula supernova of A.D. 1054. The Anasazi elders may well have been sensitized to supernovae in their youth by the A.D. 1006 supernova, the brightest and most long-lasting one in recorded history. It reached three times the size of Venus and provided as much illumination at night as when the moon is one-third full. It disappeared from the daytime sky after three months. On current supernovae prospects, see Ellen Fried's "The ungentle death of a giant star," SCIENCE 86, pp.60-64 (January-February 1986).

Day 4

Mile 56 East Kaibab Monocline: See Redfern, p.42.

Stephen Trimble, The Bright Edge: A Guide to the National Parks of the Colorado Plateau, Museum of Northern Arizona Press, Flagstaff AZ (1979), p.7.

Mile 61 The gray matter is gray due to alterations by preservatives. Few books contain pictures of freshly removed human brains with some of the original "Colorado" color left intact, but see p.276 of Carl Sagan's Cosmos (1980); it is the underlying warm reddish-brown to which I refer (best seen in the right side of the bottom picture), not the obvious red of the fine surface blood vessels.

Steven M. Stanley, "Mass extinction in the ocean." Scientific American 250(6):64-72 (June 1984). He notes that the dinosaurs went extinct over a period spanning several million years; this would be consistent with the time spanned by the meteor "shower" and multiple impacts on Earth disrupting the climate.

P. Ward, "The extinction of ammonites," Scientific American 249(4):136-147 (October 1983). Martin A. Buzas and Stephen J. Culver, "Species duration and evolution: benthic foraminifera on the Atlantic continental margin of North America." Science 225:829-830 (24 August 1984).

The comet mass-extinction proposals are in the 19 April 1984 issue of Nature. See also Stephen Jay Gould, "The cosmic dance of Siva." Natural History 93(8):14-19 (August 1984). The scientific excitement generated by this important theory is not always appreciated by the media; on 2 April 1985, the New York Times pronounced its disapproval. Such "speculation" about extraterrestrial effects on earthly life, it said in what many scientists viewed as an incredible anti-science and anti-intellectual editorial, should be left to the astrologers!

Meteor Crater dating: Stephen R. Sutton, letter, Nature 309:203 (17 May 1984).

Mile 64 Fred B. Eiseman, Jr., "The Hopi salt trail," Plateau (Museum of Northern Arizona) 32:25-32 (1959).

Mile 65 Furnace Flats shown in Powell and Porter (facing p.69); shows Desert View Tower and Tanner Trail.

B. Bloeser, J.W. Schopf, R.J. Horodyski, and W.J. Breed, "Chitinozoans from the late precambrian Chuar group of the Grand Canyon," Science 195:676-679 (1977). They date these unicellular zooplankton to 750 million years ago. Chuar Butte, its layers tilted at dramatic angles, is between Miles 61-64 on the western bank up Carbon Creek.

Stromatolite formation: See pp.30-31 of William Day, Genesis on Planet Earth, Second Edition, Yale University Press, New Haven (1984). Stevens' "blue bible" guidebook shows a picture of Subie sitting atop a large stromatolite.

Mile 71 Cardenas Creek and Unkar Delta are shown in Geerlings' p.100 (hilltop ruin in very center of tricuspid of ridgelines, campsite lower center, delta at upper left center, rapids obscured), p.130 (delta only, cliffs on left). The photo on p.100 is mislabeled; it is an aerial photo taken from above Mile 70, not from Desert View Tower. Redfern's large foldout on pp.15-18 shows Unkar Creek coming down from the North Rim. The photo on p.67 shows Unkar Delta and the cliffs above the rapid; the hilltop ruin is about 3 mm left of the dark cloud shadow in the upper middle of the picture (a closeup appears in Euler and Tikalsky, p.51). Also see photo 7 in Blaustein.

Douglas W. Schwartz, Richard C. Chapman, and Jane Kepp, Archaeology of the Grand Canyon: Unkar Delta. School of American Research Press, Sante Fe NM, volume 2 (1981).

Robert C. Euler, George J. Gumerman, Thor N. V. Karlstrom, Jeffrey S. Dean, and Richard H. Hevly, "The Colorado plateau: Cultural dynamics and paleoenvironment." Science 205:1089-1101 (14 September 1979).

The Chaco Canyon "Sun Dagger" story is summarized by Anna Sofaer, Rolf M. Sinclair, and L.E. Doggett, "Lunar markings on Fajada Butte, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico," in Archaeoastronomy in the New World, edited by A.F. Aveni, pp.169-181, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1982); the sun-only part of the story may be found in A. Sofaer, V. Zinser, and R.M. Sinclair, "A unique solar marking construct," Science 206:283-291 (1979). See Williamson (1984) for a commentary and contrast to another Anasazi "Sun Dagger" at Hovenweap. Some doubts about the Sofaer et al interpretation are M. Zeilik, Science 228:1311-1313 (1985) and J.E. Reyman, Science 229:817 (1985).

Other astronomical pictographs: the Preston's discoveries are illustrated in Arizona Highways Magazine, pp. 22-25 (February 1983).

The lunar eclipse may perhaps be best appreciated by reading while listening to the musical composition of Alan Hovaness, "On the Long Total Eclipse of the Moon, July 6, 1982." That eclipse was also the basis for this section of the book (see notes for Day 14).

Thomas Goldstein, Dawn of Modern Science, Houghton Mifflin, Boston (1980).

Lunar calendars and corrections: the early Romans had a very complicated and inaccurate moon-based calendar. Voltaire once quipped that the Roman generals always triumphed, but never knew what day it was when the victory occurred!

Horizon calendars: See Williamson (1984) and Stephen C. McCluskey, "Historical archaeoastronomy: The Hopi example," in Archaeoastronomy in the New World, edited by A.F. Aveni, pp.31-57, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1982).

Possible biological basis of religion: See Lionel Tiger's book review in The Sciences (New York Academy of Sciences), 25(2):61-63 (March 1985).

Day 5

Mile 71 Much of the population ecology in this section is based on Paul Colinvaux, The Fates of Nations: A Biological Theory of History. Simon and Shuster, New York (1980). A short version is Paul Colinvaux, "Towards a theory of history: fitness, niche, and clutch of Homo sapiens L." Journal of Ecology (1982). (Reprinted in the 1984 Penguin paperback edition of Colinvaux' 1980 book, as an appendix).

The lemming population booms are caused by a mechanism reminiscent of the "Groundhog Day" story about late winter weather; see Paul Colinvaux, Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare, Princeton University Press, Princeton (1980), ch.6.

Ecosystems provide many examples of simple rules with complex results: see A.K. Dewdney in Scientific American 251(6):14-22 (December 1984) for a computer simulation mimicking the boom-and-bust population cycles of the lynx and hare at Hudson's Bay.

Daniel R. Vining, Jr., "The growth of core regions of the third world," Scientific American 252(4):42-49 (April 1985).

The hormonal influences on birth spacing are summarized by Melvin Konner, "The nursing knot," The Sciences (New York Academy of Sciences), 25(6):10-12 (December 1985).

Spontaneous abortion estimates are from C. J. Roberts and C. R. Lowe, "Where have all the conceptions gone?," Lancet i:498 (1975), and Paul S. Weatherbee, "Early reproductive loss and the factors that influence its occurrence," Journal of Reproductive Medicine 25:315-318 (1980).

Constance Holden, "Population studies age prematurely." Science 225:1003 (7 September 1984). News article reporting on a Ford Foundation study by Jack and Pat Caldwell.

Climatic cycles in Africa: See news article by Richard A. Kerr, "Fifteen years of African drought," Science 227:1452-5 (22 March 1985), and articles in Science News 127:282-285 (4 May 1985).

Mile 76 Hance Rapid: See photos near p.153 in Collins et al, Geerlings' page 105,106. Redfern pp.36-37 shows the transition from Furnace Flats (Unkar Delta at right center) to the inner gorge near Hance Rapid (at left center).

Ilya Prigogine, Order out of chaos, Bantam, New York (1984).

Mile 84 Fluted granite and schist photographs in Powell and Porter, facing p.80; Geerlings, p.3; Leydet, p.90.

Prebiotic evolution and the genetic code: See William Day, Genesis on Planet Earth: The Search for Life's Beginnings, 2d ed. Yale University Press, New Haven (1984).

Mile 88 Redfern, pp.176-177, shows the view from the South Rim down to Phantom Ranch; this is about all that most Grand Canyon visitors see of the Colorado River, and only if they look carefully from the right spot.

Mile 93 Monument Creek camp, photo in Leydet, p.123; Blaustein photo 46.

George E. Simpson, Melville J. Herskovits, Columbia University Press, New York (1973). Herskovits (1895-1963) was virtually the founder, in the United States, of African studies and Afro-american studies. In 1936 he said, "the debt we owe the society that supports us must be made in terms of longtime payments, in our fundamental contributions toward an understanding of the nature and processes of culture, and through this, to the solution of some of our own basic problems."

Hit-or-miss toolmaking: See Mile 137 notes. Genetic code, see any modern biology text; Day's book (Mile 84) is particularly thoughtful.

Delimiting the enkephalin gene is, in practice, more complicated than just identifying the traditional start and stop codes used for this necklace. The RNA string is copied from a DNA sequence that is much longer, and includes the DNA instructions for making the stress hormone ACTH; a special code precedes the ACTH and enkephalin instructions. If there are lots of corticosteroids circulating in the bloodstream, the RNA copy is made from the enkephalin instructions; if few corticosteroids are in circulation, the ACTH instructions are copied instead. And so the circulating corticosteroids are used to determine whether ACTH is manufactured (thus producing more corticosteroids in the adrenal glands) or more enkephalin is produced.

Day 6

Mile 95 Hermit Rapid standing waves, photo in Geerlings, p.106.

Multiple sensory maps: Michael M. Merzenich and Jon H. Kaas, "Reorganization of mammalian somatosensory cortex following peripheral nerve injury." Trends in Neurosciences, pp.434-436 (December 1982). A useful summary is the news article by Jeffrey L. Fox, "Research News: The brain's dynamic way of keeping in touch." Science 225:820-1 (24 August 1984).

Templates: See "receptive fields" in any neurobiology or physiology text, or Chapter 11 in William H. Calvin and George A. Ojemann, Inside the Brain, New American Library, New York (1980). The computational building blocks of the brain are discussed by William H. Calvin and Katherine Graubard, "Styles of neuronal computation," in: The Neurosciences, Fourth Study Program, edited by F.O. Schmitt and F.G. Worden, MIT Press, Cambridge (1979), p.503.

Mile 97 The Park Service itself gave up power boats some time ago; the superb and dedicated park rangers who patrol the river corridor now use oar-powered boats much the same as ours.

Visual 4 cells for color and depth perception: See M. Zeki, "Cells responding to changing image size and disparity in the cortex of the rhesus monkey," Journal of Physiology 242:827-841 (1974).

Gene duplication, crossing-over, etc.: Tim Hunkapiller et al, "The impact of modern genetics on evolutionary theory," ch.10 in Perspectives on Evolution, edited by Roger Milkman, Sinauer, Sunderland MA (1982).

Mile 99 Crystal Rapid photos in Blaustein et al, Collins et al, and Redfern. The 1983 flood story is documented in a clipping file maintained by the River Committee of the Sierra Club. For a summary, see James R. Udall, "After the flood: Grand Canyon 1983." Sierra Club Bulletin, pp.28-32 (November 1983).

Mile 104 Martin Seligman and Joanne Hager, Biological Boundaries of Learning. Meredith, New York (1972). Discusses taste avoidance one-trail learning.

Birds and hawks: See Iren;auaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Ethology, Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, New York (1975), pp.87-88.

One consequence of schemata is that new memories may be best formed when a stimulus configuration doesn't match an existing schemata. The less conventional computer scientists have even exploited this feature: Roger C. Schank, Dynamic memory: a theory of reminding and learning in computers and people. Cambridge University Press (1982).

Bee learning: See SCIENCE 81 (May 1981)

Mile 106 Hermann Weyl, Symmetry, Princeton University Press (1952).

Science advisor to television program, quoted by Gerry Wheeler in The Sciences, pp.8-9 (September 1980).

Victor H. Denenberg, "Hemispheric laterality in animals and the effects of early experience." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4:1-50 (March 1981).

A useful collection of reviews on human brain asymmetries can be found in Cerebral Dominance, edited by the late Norman Geschwind and by Albert M. Galaburda, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (1984).

Brain asymmetries can be seen in the freshly removed human brain pictured on p.276 of Carl Sagan's Cosmos. Note that the brain's right hemisphere is much larger than its left, that the right frontal pole (lower left in top picture on p.276) and left occipital pole (upper right in picture) extend beyond their neighbors. Its "skew" is typical of most human brains; its left-right volume difference is somewhat greater than most brains show.

Mile 109 Horace B. Barlow, Nature 304:209 (21 July 1983).

Victor Weisskopf, quoted in K.C. Cole's Sympathetic Vibrations: Reflections on Physics as a Way of Life (Bantam, 1985).

Stephen Jay Gould, "The meaning of punctuated equilibrium and its role in validating a hierarchical approach to macroevolution," ch.5 in Perspectives on Evolution, edited by Roger Milkman, Sinauer, Sunderland MA (1982).

Steven M. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes, and the Origins of Species. Basic Books, New York (1981).

Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (1982). Gulick, Hagedoorn, and Sewell Wright earlier emphasized the importance of small populations for evolution; Mayr then showed how some kinds of evolution are not possible in large populations, such as those resulting from sustained inbreeding.

An excellent undergraduate text on evolution is G.L. Stebbins, Darwin and DNA,, Molecules to Humanity, Freeman, San Francisco (1982).

Day 7

Mile 109 Powell Plateau, seen from the river, is shown in Euler and Tikalsky (p.73).

Richard W. Effland, Jr., A. Trinkle Jones, and Robert C. Euler, The Archaeology of Powell Plateau: Regional Interaction at Grand Canyon. Grand Canyon Natural History Association Monograph 3 (1981).

Mile 111 An excellent introduction to speciation and isolation mechanisms is Keeton's chapter 18. For the breeding seasons of Abert and Kaibab squirrels, see Donald F. Hoffmeister, Mammals of Grand Canyon. University of Illinois Press, Urbana (1971). They have a diet-influenced mating season which only lasts about 18 hours per year -- and not every year! D.F. Hoffmeister and V.E. Diersing, "Review of the tassel-eared squirrels of the subgenus Otoscuirus," J. Mammal. 59:402-413 (1978).

Dog ancestry: See Konrad Lorenz, King Solomon's Ring, Methuen, London (1952), pp.134-5. "The northern wolf (Canis lupus) only figures in the ancestry of our present dog breeds through having been crossed with already-domesticated Aureus [jackal] dogs. Contrary to the widespread opinion that the wolf plays an essential role in the ancestry of the larger dog breeds, comparative research in behaviour has revealed the fact that all European dogs... are pure Aureus and contain, at the most, a minute amount of wolf's blood. The purest wolf-dogs that exist are certain breeds of Arctic America, particularly the so-called malemuts, huskies, etc." He also discusses juvenilization in dog domestication on p.136. His 1953 book Man Meets Dog continues the story.

Mile 115 The unmatched XY chromosomes are only found in males, but that's only true among the mammals. The birds have it backwards, the female having XY and the male XX. What really defines male/female is gamete dimorphism: small sperm, large egg. The development of this anisogamy (it is argued that once any slight size differences developed, it would have been unstable and immediately gone to extremes, the "sperm" carrying no nutrition for the zygote) a billion years ago was the beginnings of sex, together with crossing-over and outcrossing. An argument can be made that the latter originate from genetic repair mechanisms and genetic complementation -- and that variation arises as a byproduct: H. Bernstein et al, "Genetic damage, mutation, and the evolution of sex," Science 229:1277-1281 (20 September 1985).

Gregory E. Vink, W. Jason Morgan, and Peter R. Vogt, "The earth's hot spots," Scientific American 252(4):50-57 (April 1985).

Mile 116 Harold T. Stearns, Road Guide to Points of Geologic Interest in the Hawaiian Islands, 2d edition. Pacific Books, Palo Alto (1978).

Roger Lewin, "Hawaiian Drosophila: Young Islands, Old Flies." Science 229:1072-4 (13 September 1985).

Plate tectonics are illustrated by Redfern (p.23); Preston Cloud's "Beyond Plate Tectonics" American Scientist 68:381-387 (July 1980) is a useful introduction. For a review of North American fragments, see Richard A. Kerr, "The bits and pieces of plate tectonics." Science 207:1059-1061 (7 March 1980). The Colorado Plateau uplift is complex: see D.I. Gough, "Mantle upflow under North America and plate dynamics." Nature 311:428-433 (4 October 1984).

John McPhee's geology books are Basin and Range (1981), and In Suspect Terrain (1983), Farrar-Straus-Giroux, New York.

John W. Harrington, Dance of the Continents: Adventures with Rocks and Time, Houghton Mifflin, Boston (1983).

Elves Chasm photos are Blaustein (#56); Porter (facing p.126), Leydet (p.104).

Mile 118 George Gaylord Simpson, "The concept of progress in organic evolution," Social Research 41(1):51 (1974).

Romer's rule, as rephrased by C.F. Hockett and R. Ascher, "The Human Revolution," American Scientist 52:72 (1964).

William V. Mayer (professor emeritus of biology, University of Colorado), "The arrogance of ignorance -- ignoring the ubiquitous," American Zoologist 24:423 (1984).

For a description of the intellectual climate of the 1830s and Edward Blyth's statement of natural selection (about the same time that Darwin stumbled upon it), see Loren Eiseley's posthumous book Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X, Dutton, New York (1979). While Blyth provided the first written description of natural selection, he saw its role in conserving species characters (so-called convergent selection, indeed the most common role of natural selection) but not its creative role. It was Darwin, and later Wallace, who appreciated the divergent uses of natural selection that can create new species. For a history of evolutionary thought, see Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, University of California Press, Berkeley (1984).

Jacques Monod, Le Hasard et la N;aaecessit;aae, Editions du Seuil, Paris (1970; translated as Chance and Necessity, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1971).

Ralph Estling, "The trouble with thinking backwards." New Scientist pp.619-621 (2 June 1983).

Mile 119 Cell death as sculptor during development: See ch. 6 in Dale Purves and Jeff Lichtman, Principles of Neural Development Sinauer, Sunderland MA (1985). For a brief overview of neural development, see Stephen S. Easter, Jr., Dale Purves, Pasko Rakic, and Nicholas C. Spitzer, "The changing view of neural specificity," Science 230:507-511 (1 November 1985).

Donald O. Hebb, in "Alice in Wonderland, or Psychology among the biological sciences." From Biological and Biochemical Basis of Behavior, edited by H.F. Harlow and C.N. Woolsey, University of Wisconsin press, Madison (1958).

Mile 120 Glenn Hausfater and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, eds., Infanticide: Comparative and Evolutionary Perspectives. Aldine, New York (1984). See also Current Anthropology 25:500-501 (1984). The journal Ethology and Sociobiology is also a source; in its first issue (1979), Sarah Hrdy's analysis of infanticide in terms of natural selection was an important landmark in such research.

Barbara Burke, "Infanticide." SCIENCE 84 5(4):26-31 (May, 1984).

Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype. Freeman, San Francisco (1982).

Michael Ruse and Edward O. Wilson, "The evolution of ethics," New Scientist, pp.50-51 (17 October 1985).

Melvin Konner, The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit. Holt Rinehart Winston, New York (1982).

Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man. W.W. Norton, New York (1981). A sobering story of biological "determinism" but also of the scientific search for a correlate to bigger brains.

Robert Trivers, Social Evolution, Benjamin/Cummings: Palo Alto (1985).

Philip Kitcher, Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature, MIT Press (1985). See also the review of it by John Maynard Smith, Nature 318:121-122 (14 November 1985).

Theodosius Dobzhansky, Genetic diversity and human equality, Basic Books, New York (1973).

Among the many critics of sociobiology are those who think its reductionist ways miss the emergent properties that a dialectical approach would offer: see Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, Harvard University Press (1985). And that the reductionist ways are likely to be misused as biological "determinism": see Richard C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature, Pantheon, New York (1984).

Day 8

Mile 120 Francis H.C. Crick, "Thinking about the brain," Scientific American 241 (September 1979).

Virgin births prediction: See New Scientist, 18 December 1980.

John Maynard Smith, "Game theory and the evolution of behaviour." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7(1):95-126 (March 1984).

Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation. Basic Books, New York (1984). The classic paper of the same name is by Robert Axelrod and William D. Hamilton, Science 211:1190-1196 (1981). For a history and discussion, see Douglas Hofstadter's columns in Scientific American (May and June, 1983), reprinted as chapters 29-30 in Metamagical Themas, Basic Books, New York (1985).

Mile 127 Eve, then Adam: see Jeremy Cherfas and John Gribbin, The Redundant Male, Pantheon, New York (1985).

Arms race between plants and insects: lecture by May Berenbaum, "Chemical ecology syngerisms," at the University of Ottawa (19 January 1985). The arms race concept in ecology was originally developed -- another example, presumably, of how technology has occasionally stimulated theoretical thinking in biology -- by Paul R. Ehrlich and Peter H. Raven, "Butterflies and plants: a study in coevolution," Evolution 18:586-608 (1964). See also Lawrence E. Gilbert and Peter H. Raven, eds., Coevolution of Animals and Plants, University of Texas Press, Austin, revised ed. (1980).

A. Rosenfeld, "When man becomes as God: the biological prospect" Saturday Review 5:15-20 (1977)

Asian flu hypercycle discussed by Erich Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe. Pergamon, New York (1980) at p.191.

Immune system self-organization: See Manfred Eigen and Ruthild Winkler, Laws of the game: How the principles of nature govern chance. Harper, New York (German edition 1976, English translation 1981). They summarize the model of locks and keys on the same defender cell and self-organization for diversity and self-recognition. The extension of the idea to a restricted setup period in early development using the sterile male strategy is, so far as I know, mine (but I may have reinvented the wheel). My what-if description of antigens and antibodies is also over-simplified: see Niels K. Jerne, "The generative grammar of the immune system," Science 229:1057-1059 (13 September 1985).

Mile 132 Stone Creek photo in Powell and Porter (facing p.91). Redfern (pp.28-29) illustrates a time line.

Evolution of neural mechanisms: for a discussion of the evolution of the protein that controls the sodium channel in neural and muscle membranes, see the last chapter of Bertil Hille's Ionic Channels of Excitable Membranes, Sinauer, Sunderland Massachusetts (1984).

William H. Calvin and Daniel K. Hartline, "Retrograde invasion of lobster stretch receptor somata in the control of firing rate and extra spike patterning." Journal of Neurophysiology 40:106-118 (January 1977). For signal code comparisons, see W. H. Calvin, "Setting the pace and pattern of discharge: Do CNS neurons vary their sensitivity to external inputs via their repetitive firing processes?," Federation Proceedings 37:2165-2170 (June 1978).

Calcium entry in Paramecium: See Roger Ekert and David Randall, Animal Physiology: Mechanisms and Adaptations, 2d edition, Freeman, San Francisco (1983), p.324, p.401.

For an example of self-organization principles applied to neural circuits for sensory templates ("schemata"), see: George N. Reeke, Jr., and Gerald M. Edelman, "Selective networks and recognition automata." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 426:181-201 (1984). See also Gerald M. Edelman and Vernon B. Mountcastle, The Mindful Brain, MIT Press, Cambridge (1978).

Mile 134 Tapeats Canyon atop Bright Angel is shown in Blaustein's photo 60, Colorado River near campsite in photo 63. Tapeats Creek near river is shown facing page 102 in Powell and Porter. Thunder Springs in shown in Blaustein's photo 61 and in Powell and Porter facing page 104.

R.C. Euler epigram, in Fowler et al (1969) cited at Mile 52.

Ann Trinkle Jones and Robert C. Euler, A Sketch of Grand Canyon Prehistory, Grand Canyon Natural History Association, Grand Canyon (1979).

Mount St. Helens landslide: the mark of the great wave can be seen by driving to Windy Ridge at the end of the forest road about 40 km south of Randle, Washington.

Tropical soils: See Paul Colinvaux, Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare. Princeton University Press, Princeton (1978).

Daniel Simberloff, book review in The Sciences (New York Academy of Sciences), 25(1):54 (January 1985). E. O. Wilson, Biophilia, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (1984).

Norman Myers, The Primary Source: Tropical Forests and Our Future. W.W. Norton, New York (1984).

Catherine Caufield, In the Rainforest. Alfred A. Knopf, New York (1985).

Stephen H. Schneider and Randi Londer, The Coevolution of Climate and Life. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco (1984).

Mick Kelly, "Not with a bang but a winter." New Scientist pp33-36, 13 September 1984.

The TTAPS paper and the biologists' assessment are in Science 222(4630):1283-1300 (23 December 1983); they are reprinted as an appendix in Paul R. Ehrlich, Carl Sagan, Donald Kennedy, and Walter Orr Roberts, The Cold and the Dark: The World after Nuclear War. W.W. Norton, New York (1984). See also: National Academy of Sciences (U.S.), The Effects on the Atmosphere of a Major Nuclear Exchange. National Academy Press, Washington, D.C. (1985).

The Cruetzen story is reported by Dennis Overbye, "Prophet of the cold and dark." DISCOVER, pp24-32 (January 1985). The Alvarez discovery is related by Richard A. Muller, "An adventure in science," New York Times Magazine, pp34-50 (24 March 1985) and his forthcoming book Nemesis.

Valmore C. LaMarche, Jr., and Katherine K. Hirschboeck (1984). "Frost rings in trees as records of major volcanic eruptions." Nature 307:121-126 (12 January 1984).

Stephen H. Schneider, "Atmospheric double exposure." Natural History 93(4):98-101 (April 1984).

Day 9

Mile 134 Ringtails: See Donald F. Hoffmeister, Mammals of Grand Canyon. University of Illinois Press, Urbana (1971).

DNA dates: See Charles G. Sibley and Jon E. Ahlquist, "The phylogeny of the hominoid primates, as indicated by DNA-DNA hybridization." Journal of Molecular Evolution 20:2-15 (1984).

Steven M. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes, and the Origin of Species. Basic Books, New York (1981).

Stephen Jay Gould, "The cosmic dance of Siva." Natural History 93(8):14-19 (1984).

John A. O'Keefe, "The terminal Eocene event: formation of a ring system around the Earth?" Nature 285:309-311 (1980). Also see New Scientist, p.13 (21 March 1985) for suggestions of a lunar volcanic origin of the tektites.

Mile 136 Deer Creek lower falls is shown in Geerlings on page 120, in Blaustein's photo 67. The entrance to the hidden valley is shown in Powell and Porter, facing page 113, looking back towards the river to where the trail emerges. Facing page 118 is a view of the cataracts. Leydet, page 139, has a view of the trail above the cataracts leading in to the valley; page 141 shows the "restricted" view of upper Deer Creek Falls which begins the cataract.

Alister C. Hardy, "Was man more aquatic in the past?" New Scientist 7:642-645 (1960).

Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman, Stein and Day, New York (1972), and The Aquatic Ape: A Theory of Human Evolution, Stein and Day, New York (1982). Her 1982 appendix reprints much of Leon LaLumiere's article, together with Alister Hardy's articles. Recent New Scientist updates are 12 April 1984 (p.11, on salt regulation) and 21 March 1985 (p.27, on sweating and tearing).

Shlomo Cohen, Red Sea Diver's Guide, Red Sea Publications, Tel Aviv, Israel (1975). After Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt in 1982, Egyptian fishing boats returned to the Sinai waters, throwing dynamite overboard to kill fish, collecting what floated -- and destroying numerous million-year-old coral reefs in the process.

Randall Susman's observations of pygmy chimps wading in water and catching fish are reported by Paul Raeburn, "An uncommon chimp," SCIENCE 83 4(5):40-48 (June 1983).

Adrienne L. Zihlman, John E. Cronin, Douglas L. Cramer, and Vincent M. Sarich, "Pygmy chimpanzee as a possible prototype for the common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas." Nature 275:744-746 (1978).

John Emsley, "There is no substitute for salt." New Scientist 1433:28-32 (6 December 1984). An encyclopedic treatment is by Derek Denton, The Hunger for Salt, Springer Verlag, New York (1982).

Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man, Houghton Mifflin, Boston (1971).

Jane Goodall, "Continuities between chimpanzee and human behavior." In Human Origins: Louis Leakey and the East African Evidence, volume 3 of Perspectives on Human Evolution. Edited by Glynn Ll. Isaac and Elizabeth R. McCown, pp. 81-96. Menlo Park, Calif.: W. A. Benjamin (1976).

Jane Goodall, "The behaviour of free-living chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Preserve." Animal Behaviour Monographs 1(3):161-311 (1968). See p.203 for throwing data.

Geza Teleki, "The omnivorous chimp." Scientific American 228(1):32-42 (1973).

Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes. Harper and Row, New York (1983).

Dian Fossey, Gorillas in the Mist. Houghton Mifflin, Boston (1983). Her work makes it possible to compare gorillas with chimps in their natural settings; the differing diet and mating systems help one construct a possible composite picture of our ancestor 10 million years back.

Lewis R. Binford, In Pursuit of the Past: Decoding the Archaeological Record, Thames and Hudson, New York (1983).

Robin Dunbar, "The ecology of monogamy," New Scientist 103:12-15 (30 August 1984).

Nancy Makepeace Tanner, On Becoming Human. Cambridge University Press, New York (1981). The food sharing that does occur among chimps is seen when dividing up a kill of a small animal, such as a young bushpig or monkey.

Consort relationships in primates: for baboons, see Shirley C. Strum, "Baboons may be smarter than people," Animal Kingdom (New York Zoological Society) 88(2):12-25 (April 1985). For chimpanzees, see de Waal and Goodall.

David R. Carrier, "The energetic paradox of human running and hominid evolution," Current Anthropology (August 1984).

Eric Delson, "Oreopithecus is a cercopithecoid after all." American Journal of Physical Anthropology 50(3):431-432 (1979).

Concealed ovulation: See Richard D. Alexander and Katherine N. Noonan, "Concealment of ovulation, parental care, and human social evolution," pp. 436-453 in Evolutionary Biology and Human Social Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective, edited by N.A. Chagnon and W.G. Irons, Duxbury Press, North Sciuate, Massachusetts (1979). Summarized in R.D. Alexander, Darwinism and Human Affairs, University of Washington Press, Seattle (1979).

C. Owen Lovejoy, "The natural detective." Natural History 93(10):24-28 (October 1984). For a modern savannah theory, see C. Owen Lovejoy, "The origin of man," Science 211:341-350 (23 January 1981). His reproductive strategy arguments are reported on in Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind, Simon and Shuster, New York (1981).

Richard B. Lee, "What hunters do for a living or, how to make out on scarce resources." In: Man the Hunter, edited by R. B. Lee and I. DeVore, pp. 30-48. Aldine, Chicago (1968).

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, The Woman that Never Evolved, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (1981).

Lucy and family are reviewed by Donald C. Johanson and Tim D. White, "A systematic assessment of early African hominids," Science 203:321-330 (1979) and in the popular book by Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind, Simon and Shuster, New York (1981). The Afarensis aficionado should see Journal of Physical Anthropology, 57:373-724 (1982). The dating of upright posture is covered by Richard L. Hay and Mary D. Leakey, "The fossil footprints of Laetoli," Scientific American 246:50-57 (1982).

Mile 137 Everett J. Bassett, Margaret S. Keith, George J. Armelagos, Debra L. Martin, and Antonio R. Villanueva, "Tetracycline-labeled human bone from ancient Sudanese Nubia (A.D. 350)," Science 209:1532-34 (26 September 1980).

Richard Potts, "Home bases and early hominids." American Scientist 72:338-347 (July-August 1984). Cautions that the early sites may be butchery sites, not habitations. Existing hunter-gatherers don't reoccupy exact site as before when they move back to an area, since ants and such have been attracted to the old garbage dump. It might have been best for hominids to nest in trees like other apes, and not butcher nearby.

Cave-dwelling and fire in Peking Man: See some cautions by Lewis Binford and Chuan Kun Ho in Current Anthropology 26:413 (1985).

Glynn Ll. Isaac and Diana C. Crader, "To what extent were early hominids carnivorous? An archeological perspective." Chapter 3 in: Omnivorous Primates: Gathering and Hunting in Human Evolution, edited by Robert S.O. Harding and Geza Teleki. Columbia University Press, New York (1981).

Eileen M. O'Brien, "What was the Acheulean hand ax?," Natural History 93:20-23 (July 1984).

Eileen M. O'Brien, "The projectile capabilities of an Acheulian handaxe from Olorgesailie." Current Anthropology 22:76-79 (February 1981).

M.D.W. Jeffreys, "The Handbolt," Man 65:153-154 (1965).

Acheulean hand axes are of two main types: those with one heavier end, and those that are ovoid-shaped, with their center of gravity in the middle and which are trimmed to a thin edge on their whole circumference. See p.46 in Flint Implements from the British Museum, Third Edition (1968). "Often even the butt of a pointed hand-axe is so much sharpened by trimming that it is difficult to believe it was held in the hand, while the point is often so delicate as to seem too fragile for any use which the comparatively massive butt would suit.... The possibility that the ovates were thrown at the prey cannot of course be dismissed."

My term "stochastic toolmaking" is a description of the brute force, hit-or-miss fracturing of potato-sized rocks (see Day 5, Mile 93). The late Harvard archaeologist Glynn Ll. Isaac demonstrated the method in a lecture at the University of Washington on 31 January 1984, entitled "Early hominids: evolution and environmental settings, technological and social initiatives." The Berkeley archaeologist Nicholas Toth details his experiments with toolmaking techniques in "The Oldowan reassessed: a closer look at early stone artifacts," Journal of Archaeological Sciences 12:101 (1985), and "Archeological evidence for preferential right-handedness in the lower and middle Pleistocene, and its possible implications," Journal of Human Evolution 14:607 (1985); related issues are reviewed by Sarah Bunney, "The origins of manual dexterity," New Scientist, p.24 (28 November 1985).

Glynn Llywelyn Isaac, "Aspects of human evolution," in Essays on Evolution: A Darwin Centenary Volume (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

For a brief history of the IBM PC and the 1985 demise of IBM's independent Florida offshoot, see Dennis Kneale, "IBM will move headquarters of PC division," Wall Street Journal, p.2 (14 June 1985). It "began in 1981 as an autonomous "independent business unit" with a handful of employees working outside IBM's close corporate oversight. The unit developed a PC prototype in only three months and brought the machine to market less than a year later by breaking IBM's usually rigid rules against relying on outside suppliers for many parts."

Of course, the energy economics of the food chain mean that 90 percent of the calories are wasted by each intermediate stage. Some animals favored by farmers are more efficient than 1/10, at least in turning corn into meat: 1/8 for beef, 1/4 for pork, 1/2 for poultry (at best). Half of the grain in the world is now consumed by animals in aid of providing meat on the plates of the Western world, rather than the grain itself. E.J. Kahn, Jr., "Profiles (Corn)," New Yorker (18 June 1984), p.49.; see also his Staffs of Life, Little, Brown (1985).

Day 10

Mile 137 Brain size in Homo erectus: G. Philip Rightmire, lecture entitled "Early hominids in southeast Asia" at the University of Washington, 6 March 1984. The argument of changing brain size within the 1.5 million years of Homo erectus is made by Milford H. Wolpoff in Paleobiology (Fall 1984).

Wu Rukang and Lin Shenglong, "Peking Man," Scientific American 248:86-94 (June 1983).

Erik Trinkaus and William W. Howells, "The Neanderthals," Scientific American 241(6):118-133, December 1979.

A summary of primate behavior and hominid data is John E. Pfeiffer's The Emergence of Humankind, Harper and Row, New York (1985).

Mile 143 Randall L. Susman, editor, The Pygmy Chimpanzee: Evolutionary Biology and Behavior. Plenum, New York (1984). See also Paul Raeburn, "An uncommon chimp," SCIENCE 83 4(5):40-48 (June 1983).

Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (1977).

Ashley Montagu, Growing Young. McGraw-Hill, New York (1981).

Raymond P. Coppinger and C. Kay Smith, book review in The Sciences (New York Academy of Sciences), 23(3):50-54 (May/June 1983). They have a forthcoming book on neoteny and human nature.

Lloyd D. Partridge, "The good enough calculi of evolving control systems: evolution is not engineering." American Journal of Physiology 242:R173-R177 (1982).

The "explosive speciation" of cichlid fish in East African lakes: see P.H. Greenwood, Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History), Zoology Supplement 6:1-13 (1974). The many new species are, however, being eliminated by the thoughtless importation of fish-eating fish species into African lakes; the introduction of Nile perch into Lake Victoria has been a disaster; the indigenous fishes of commercial importance have not merely declined but have virtually disappeared. See C.D.N. Barel et al, "Destruction of fisheries in Africa's lakes," Nature 315:19-20 (2 May 1985).

Mile 145 A comprehensive physical anthropology textbook is Bernard Campbell's Human Evolution, Third Edition, Aldine, New York (1985). See also Fred H. Smith and Frank Spencer, eds., The Origins of Modern Humans, Liss, New York (1984).

Head size in proportion to rest of body at various developmental stages: See fig. 17.17 in W. T. Keeton's text, Biological Science, 3d ed. (1980), and W.M. Krogman, "Growth changes in the skull, face, jaws, and teeth of the chimpanzee," in The Chimpanzee: Anatomy, Behavior, and Diseases, edited by G. H. Bourne, pp. 104-164, Karger, Basel (1969).

For comparison of brain size along primates: See Richard Passingham's fine undergraduate text, The Human Primate, Freeman, San Francisco (1982), at p.112. Note that Passingham, an expert on primate brain/body ratios, manages to avoid juvenilization-neoteny-paedomorphosis as a topic relevant to hominid evolution; the anthropologists are, alas, not alone in this predilection. Many biology texts, e.g., Keeton, also omit juvenilization as a topic.

Length of gestation, infancy (total dependency), juvenile phase (additional years until full size, somewhat past puberty), and adult (reproductive and post-reproductive years) phases are contrasted for lemur, chimp, and humans in Richard E. Leakey and Roger Lewin, Origins, Dutton, New York (1977), on p. 149. To summarize:

Gestation Infancy Juvenile Adult TOTAL Lifespan
Lemur 0.35 0.5 2 11+ 14 years
Chimp 0.65 3 7 30 41
Human (0.73) 6 14 55+ 75

While chimpanzee gestation is about 8 months, human gestation would be double that (1.3 years) if we were born as mature as other apes are (judging developmental landmarks, such as the ability to sit upright and closure of skull sutures). See J.M. Tanner, Foetus into Man: Physical Growth from Conception to Maturity, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (1978). The first half-year or so after birth is, in a sense, extrauterine gestation, 40 percent of the total (fetal head size is, of course, the major reason for the "premature" birth). It is something akin to what happens with kangaroos, but without a pocket. Stephen Jay Gould discusses this in relation to Homo erectus in an essay in Discover (December 1985), pp. 53-58. Thus, most life phases approximately double in going from chimp to human, suggesting a halving of developmental clock rates.

Masao Kawai, "Newly acquired precultural behavior of the natural troop of Japanese monkeys on Koshima islet." Primates 6:1-30 (1965).

Toolmaking by the orangutan: R.V.S. Wright's research is shown in Passingham, pp.135-7.

Mile 148 Matkatamiba is shown in Blaustein's photos 73-75, Powell and Porter facing page 77, and Redfern p.154.

"Reliable recipe for rapid ratcheting." You'll notice that mutation rates do not play a prominent role in this recipe for speeding up evolution; permutation is assumed to be quite sufficient, thanks to sex. But there are some cycles that might increase cosmic rays, and thus point mutations: the earth's magnetic field has reversed a few times during the last 2 million years; during such reversals, the Van Allen belts, which normally trap some of the incoming particles out in space, are temporarily eliminated. Just how important these reversals are is unknown; they could operate either by increasing mutations or simply by making natural selection more severe, messing up the food supply. The field hasn't reversed since 0.73 million years ago, although if its strength keeps decreasing as fast as it has since about 1950, we could see another reversal 250 years from now.

Scavenging arguments: See Pat Shipman, "The ancestor that wasn't," The Sciences, 25(2):43-48 (March 1985) and the news article by Bruce Bower, "Hunting ancient scavengers," Science News 127:155-157 (9 March 1985). Relying on a rare top predator as a middleman makes quantitative energetic arguments quite important, though this obvious food-chain-niche-size limitation usually goes unmentioned; scavenging is a good example of a limited growth curve.

William H. Calvin, "A stone's throw and its launch window: timing precision and its implications for language and hominid brains." Journal of Theoretical Biology 104:121-135 (September 1983).

William H. Calvin, The Throwing Madonna: Essays on the Brain. McGraw-Hill, New York (1983). An appendix reprints my 1982 article from Ethology and Sociobiology; its proposals for how prehumans got started throwing have been largely superceded by the present ones involving threat throwing by scavengers, unaimed handaxe throwing into waterhole herds, developing into aimed throwing at smaller solitary targets. I thank my colleague Joan Lockard for having called threat throwing to my attention.

William H. Calvin and Charles F. Stevens, "Synaptic noise and other sources of randomness in motoneuron interspike intervals." Journal of Neurophysiology 31:574-587 (July 1968).

Philip J. Darlington, Jr., Evolution for Naturalists. Wiley, New York (1980). One of the first champions of throwing in evolution.

Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man. H. Mifflin, Boston (1971). Her appendix includes examples of throwing; more details can be found in her article "The behaviour of free-living chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Preserve," Animal Behaviour Monographs 1(3):161-311 (1968) at p.203.

Darwin, recognizing that variation around the average, rather than the average type itself, was the motive force for evolution: see Richard C. Lewontin, "Darwin's revolution," New York Review of Books (16 June 1983).

Sven O.E. Ebbesson, "Evolution and ontogeny of neural circuits." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7(3):321-331 (September 1984). My commentary "Precision timing requirements suggest wider brain connections, not more restricted ones" appears in the same issue at p.334.

Scientists use the Law of Large Numbers all the time, because of its application to statistics (it's why one strives for a large number of separate measurements, so that random sources of error will average out); to halve your measurement error, take four times as many samples. But we tend not to think in terms of the Law of Large Numbers when it comes to nature. That's because something has to do the adding and subtracting and dividing: when doing a scientific experiment, we do that with paper and pencil. And that's so artificial that we don't imagine nature doing the same thing. But nature sometimes does, as when the heart cells pool their irregular electrical currents to make the beat more rhythmic. THINK STOCHASTIC!

Mile 150 Female scenarios for evolution of hammering and throwing: See ch.1 and ch.3 in William H. Calvin, The Throwing Madonna: Essays on the Brain. McGraw-Hill, New York (1983).

Mile 155 William H. Calvin and George A. Ojemann, Inside the Brain: Mapping the Cortex, Exploring the Neuron. New American Library, New York (Mentor paperback, 1980). Pre-throwing-theory, this supplementary text illustrates brain maps and is especially good as an introduction to the language specializations. For an advanced treatment, see George A. Ojemann, "Brain organization for language from the perspective of electrical stimulation mapping." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6(2):189-230 (June 1983).

Doreen Kimura, "Neuromotor mechanisms in the evolution of human communication." In: Neurobiology of Social Communication in Primates, edited by H.D. Steklis and M.J. Raleigh, Academic Press, New York, pp. 197-219 (1979).

Ashley Montagu, "Toolmaking, hunting, and the origin of language." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 280:266-274 (1976).

Ovid J.L. Tzeng and William S.-Y. Wang, "Search for a common neurocognitive mechanism for language and movements," American Journal of Physiology 246:R904-R911 (1984). Sequencing as the neural predecessor of language.

Sue Taylor Parker and Kathleen Rita Gibson, "A developmental model for the evolution of language and intelligence in early hominids." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 2:367-408 (1979). Also see follow-up comments in June 1982 issue.

Dwight Sutton, "Mechanisms underlying vocal control in nonhuman primates." In: Neurobiology of Social Communication in Primates, edited by H.D. Steklis and M.J. Raleigh, Academic Press, New York, pp. 45-68 (1979).

J.L. Bradshaw and N.C. Nettleton, "The nature of hemispheric specialization in man." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4:51-92 (March 1981).

Neighbors of language cortex: the premotor cortex, while classically related to things such as planning sequential motor acts (and there are extensive connections to the wrist part of the motor cortex), also serves as a language area in humans (see Ojemann's maps). Stephen P. Wise, "The primate premotor cortex," Annual Reviews of Neuroscience 8:1-19 (1985); K.F. Muakassa and Peter L. Strick, "Frontal lobe inputs to primate motor cortex: evidence for four somatotopically organized 'premotor' areas," Brain Research, 177:176-182 (1979).

The descent of the larynx: See Jeffrey T. Laitman, "The anatomy of human speech," Natural History 93(8):20-27 (August 1984).

For an overview of language biology: See Philip Lieberman's The Biology and Evolution of Language, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (1984). As he correctly points out, neoteny cannot explain the descent of the larynx in anatomically-modern Homo sapiens sapiens; this hardly "refutes neoteny" as being a major factor in hominid evolution but only provides another example of how it cannot explain every adaptation. Neoteny cannot explain the shape of our nose either, and that's not subtle and hidden (Elaine Morgan suggests that our nose shape is an aquatic adaptation).

Nonverbal communication: See Alison Jolly, "The evolution of primate behavior," American Scientist 73:230-239 (1985); and Joan S. Lockard, ed. Evolution of Human Social Behavior. Elsevier, Amsterdam (1980).

Deux ex machina: See Mary Renault, The Mask of Apollo.

Elizabeth Bates, "Bioprograms and the innateness hypothesis." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7:188-189 (1984).

Theodore Holmes Bullock, "Comparative neuroscience holds promise for quiet revolutions." Science 225:473-478 (3 August 1984).

Joan Didion, Michigan Quarterly Review, 18(4):521-534 (Autumn 1979).

Day 11

Mile 155 William McGrew, "Evolutionary implications of sex differences in chimpanzee predation and tool use." In The Great Apes, volume 5 of Perspectives on Human Evolution. Edited by David A. Hamburg and Elizabeth R. McCown. pp. 441-464. Benjamin/Cummings, Menlo Park, Calif.(1979).

Christophe Boesch and Hedwige Boesch, "Sex differences in the use of natural hammers by wild chimpanzees: a preliminary report." Journal of Human Evolution 10:585-593 (1981).

Jane Goodall, "Tool-using in Primates and Other Vertebrates." Advances in the Study of Behaviour 3:195-249 (1970).

Frances Dahlberg, editor, Woman the Gatherer. Yale University Press, New Haven (1981). Includes a discussion of the Agta of the Philippines, where the women hunt systematically.

Manfred Clynes, editor, Music, Mind, and Brain. Plenum, New York (1982).

Mile 157 Havasu Canyon is shown in Blaustein's photos 76,77; Geerlings pages 124-128.

Loren Eiseley, "Man and novelty," in Time and stratigraphy in the evolution of man, US National Academy of Sciences, publ. 1469 (1967), pp.65-79.

Melatonin, the hormone from the pineal, is not related to melanin, the skin pigment. It was, however, named after it because melatonin causes melanin to cluster in frog skin.

Melatonin-pineal: See the symposium volume "The Medical and Biological Effects of Light," Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 453 (1985). See also Bruce Fellman, "A clockwork gland," SCIENCE 85 6(4):76-81 (May 1985).

Awareness as consciousness: Neurologists tell of examples of brain damage where the patient will deny seeing a light -- but can point to it accurately if asked to guess. It's called blindsight.

The classic reference on how the common sense view of consciousness leads to absurdities is Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, Barnes and Noble, New York (1949); Arthur Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine (London, 1967) may also be of interest. The serial ordering of concepts as a key aspect of consciousness was elaborated by G. Humphrey, Thinking, Menthuen, London (1951) and K.S. Lashley, "Cerebral organization in behavior" in L.A. Jeffress (editor), Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior, Wiley, New York (1951), pp.112-146.

Kathryn Morton, "The Story-Telling Animal," New York Times Book Review, pp.1-2 (23 December 1984).

Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot, Vintage (1985).

Walter J. Freeman, "A physiological hypothesis of perception," Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, (Summer 1981), pp.561-592.

Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (1978).

Richard D. Alexander, Darwinism and Human Affairs. University of Washington Press, Seattle (1979).

W.H. Auden, in The New Yorker (1970), quoted by Loren Eiseley in The Star Thrower, p.20.

Elizabeth Loftus, Memory. Addison-Wesley, Boston (1980).

Canals on Mars: See Arthur C. Clarke, 1984: Spring, A Choice of Futures. Ballantine Books, New York (1984).

Julian Jaynes, lecture "The Self" at New York Academy of Sciences, 9 December 1985, and The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Houghton Mifflin, Boston (1976). His book's first section is a good summary of what consciousness isn't. One will not find my present view of consciousness (the narrator arising from temporarily-independent sequencing circuits playing games with schemata, the "most reasonable" then funneled through the language serial bottleneck) expressed in more detail elsewhere; most of the following references are to classical views.

For willed intentions starting before one is aware of it, see Benjamin Libet et al, "Subjective referral of the timing for a conscious sensory experience," Brain 102 (March 1979) and the various critiques in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (December 1985).

Donald R. Griffin, Animal Thinking. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (1984). A view of animal consciousness, though lacking in any comparison of sequential planning skills amongst animals. If the emergence of our human consciousness depends in part on our sequencing skills, it will be important to assess animal skills in that regard if meaningful comparisons are to be made.

A common view of consciousness is expressed in the tendency to attribute to animals much of our human awareness, e.g., to see a monkey using a tool, say "isn't that clever?" and attribute to them the kind of insight and planning of which humans are sometimes capable. Ethology and behavioral psychology tend to take a narrower view, looking for antecedents of the tool use and studying the ways in which tool use arises in a naive population. Cebus monkeys (Capuchin and organ-grinder's monkey are some common names) are among the most clever tool users outside of the apes; still, the discovery of how to probe for hidden syrup down a hole using a broken branch seems not so much a "eureka" phenomenon as a gradual piecing together of the elements of the puzzle by some trial-and-error, with the finished concept then spread by observation learning, and elaborated into making the appropriate tool. Talk at the University of Washington by Professor Doree Fragaszy on 28 May 1985 entitled "Capuchin monkeys making and using tools: how do they measure up to chimps?"

Francis H.C. Crick, "Thinking about the brain," Scientific American 241 (September 1979).

The various positions that neuroscientists have taken on the mind-brain problem are usefully summarized by Ronald Chase in "The mentalist hypothesis and invertebrate neurobiology," Perspectives in Biology and Medicine pp.103-117 (Autumn 1979). See also Gordon Rattray Taylor, The Natural History of the Mind, Dutton, New York (1979). Particularly notable are the books of the neurophysiologist John C. Eccles [e.g., The Human Mystery (1979) and The Human Psyche (1980) from Springer Verlag]; among the best-informed and most accomplished of neurophysiologists, his skillful -- but, I think, increasingly unsuccessful -- efforts to fit our knowledge of the brain into a classical philosophical framework convince me that the questions are simply posed wrong in classical thinking, and that for heuristic reasons if none other, we must seek new ways of thinking about the mind-body problem.

My model of sentence formulation, based on quality judgments made about many random permutations of schemata which come to mind, may provide a parallel mechanistic model for Noam Chomsky's proposal to permit syntax to overgenerate profusely and then to provide most of the significant reduction in the form of a system of filters and constraints on logical form. This is the starting point of what is called trace theory in linguistics: see Binding and Filtering, edited by Frank Heny, MIT Press, Cambridge (1982).

Selective attention: See S. Hochstein and J.H.R. Maunsell, "Dimensional attention effects in the responses of V4 neurons of the macaque monkey," Society for Neuroscience Abstracts 364.6 (1985). Swamping precision problems with large numbers of neurons: Besides throwing, I have extended the theory to fine sensory discriminations such as depth perception. See William H. Calvin, "Fine discrimination as an emergent property of parallel neural circuits," Society for Neuroscience Abstracts 10(2):756 (1984); the same principle also applies to color discriminations as well.

Shawn Carlson, "A double-blind test of astrology," Nature 318:419-425 (5 December 1985).

Mile 163 The Thomas Traherne epigram comes from R. Miller, Meaning and Consciousness in the Intact Brain, Clarendon Press, Oxford (1981).

Mile 166 National Canyon "chute" is shown in Powell and Porter facing page 142.

Peter K. Stevens, Patterns in Nature, Little Brown, Boston (1974). The classic is D'Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form, Cambridge University Press (1917, abridged edition 1971); the bighorn's corkscrew is among its many examples.

Emergent patterns from simple component parts: Stephen Wolfram, "Cellular automata as models of complexity." Nature 311:419-424 (4 October 1984). Unfortunately, the inverse problem is more difficult: what rules and initial conditions tend to give self-organizing patterns?

Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1944).

Conway game of Life: see Eigen and Winkler (1976) or William Poundstone's The Recursive Universe, Morrow, New York (1984).

David G. King, "Metaptation: The product of selection at the second tier." Submitted to Paleobiology (1985). See also Elizabeth Vrba and Niles Eldredge, "Individuals, hierarchies, and processes: towards a more complete evolutionary theory." Paleobiology 10:146-171 (1984).

Knut Schmidt-Nielsen, Scaling: Why is animal size so important?, Cambridge University Press (1984).

Jumps into hyperspace: at least that's how it worked on the first such computer game, Spacewar, which I used to play on the PDP-1 computer at M.I.T. in 1961. For a description of those heady days, see ch.3 of Steven Levy's Hackers, Doubleday, New York (1984).

J.B.S. Haldane, On being the right size (and other essays). Oxford University Press (1985).

Theodosius Dobzhansky, The Biology of Ultimate Concern, Rapp and Whiting, London (1969).

Day 12

Mile 166 Loren Eiseley, "Man and novelty," in Time and stratigraphy in the evolution of man, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, publ. 1469 (1967), pp.65-79.

Historical research has shown that if one identifies a series of advances in science, the key research that opened up the advance was considered at the time so remote from the area eventually illuminated as to be essentially irrelevant. See the book by the medical physiologist Julius Comroe, Retrospectroscope: Insights into Medical Discovery. Von Gohr Press (1977). A short version is in Science 192:105-111 (1976). A similar analysis for the physical sciences is by Leon M. Lederman, "The value of fundamental science," Scientific American 251(5):40 (November 1984).

Mile 170 Parkinson's disease cell-death percentages, summarized by J.W. Langston, "The case of the tainted heroin." The Sciences (New York Academy of Sciences), 25(1):40, (January 1985).

Selection ineffective after menopause except for rearing existing offspring: I can think of one major exception to this. Because of juvenilization doubling the duration of lifespan phases, our age 45 may be age 22 in our ape-like ancestor; chimps may be reproductive for a decade after that (e.g., "Flo" at Gombe), corresponding to our age 65. Thus, our ape ancestors might have been under some selection for our kind of longevity, even though more recent hominids are not. We could owe some of our post-menopause lifespan to our long-lived ape ancestors rather than more recent long-lived hominid ancestors.

Ronald Melzack and Patrick D. Wall, The Challenge of Pain, Basic Books (1984).

Mile 177 Vulcan's Forge and lava dam: See Redfern, pp.108-110.

Mile 179 Lava Falls photos in Blaustein et al, Collins et al, and Redfern pp.104-105, 190-191.

I have thus far spared readers a description of my 1984 trip through Lava Falls. It was less daunting than the 1982 run described in the text, but appalling in another way. There was a yellow helicopter (registration N93MI) at Lava, making repeated passes over the rapid so that a TV camera could follow a little one-person boat going through the waves, then picking up the boat and ferrying it back upriver so that still another run could be photographed. It was all for a cigarette commercial for German television. As we ate lunch on the ledge below Lava, we were buzzed a half-dozen times by the helicopter, engaged in its ignoble mission of promoting a drug addiction by persuading gullible viewers that real outdoors people smoked cigarettes. Of the several dozen "outdoors types" in our group (largely nonscientists that trip), there was only one regular smoker (a 17-year-old, exactly the age group at which such commercials are aimed); none of the boatmen were smokers.

Besides the ubiquitous tourist overflights, we were buzzed in 1980 by an F-16 at 50 m altitude; later at Mile 220, we were buzzed four times at dusk by a small plane flying at 10 m altitude above the river in the narrow canyon. It was trying to drop ice cream to a "super deluxe" motor tour group camped downstream of us. In 1985, a helicopter crashed into the Colorado River at Mile 4, killing two, while filming a movie. In midday, the virtually unregulated air traffic is audible more than half of the time at many places in the Canyon; the governor of Arizona compares it to Phoenix at rush hour. The U.S. Secretary of the Interior (who is responsible for the national parks) was quoted in August 1985 as saying that the mounting complaints about air traffic over the Grand Canyon were unimportant. I don't mind small planes (I have a private pilot's license myself) but their routine use in wilderness areas and national parks is clearly incompatible with the reasons for which we set such areas aside.

Mile 182 Hexagonal basalt "tapestries" are shown in Blaustein's photos 88,91.

Loren Eiseley, The Star Thrower, p.202 (1978).

Stephen H. Schneider and Randi Londer, The Coevolution of Climate and Life, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco (1984).

John Imbrie and K.P. Imbrie, Ice Ages: Solving the Problem, Enslow, Short Hills NJ (1979).

John Imbrie and J.Z. Imbrie, "Modeling the climatic response to orbital variations," Science 207:943-953 (1980).

John Gribbin, "New statistics tie climate theories together." New Scientist, p.20 (7 February 1985).

Rainfall changes due to CO>2< warming: See Gina Maranto, "Are we close to the road's end?," Discover, pp.28-50 (January 1986).

G. Kukla, A. Berger, R. Lotti, and J. Brown, "Orbital signature of interglacials." Nature 290:295-300 (26 March 1981).

André Berger, "Support for the astronomical theory of climatic change." Nature 269:44-45 (1 September 1977).

Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1949), p.190.

Mile 186 William F. Ruddiman, lecture entitled "CLIMAP reconstruction of the last interglaciation," 7 May 1985 at the University of Washington.

Ice sheet data for the last glacial period are summarized by Wallace S. Broecker, Dorothy M. Peteet, and David Rind, "Does the ocean-atmosphere system have more than one stable mode of operation?," Nature 315:21-26 (2 May 1985). In their figure 2, note the many brief "spikes" of intensified cold lasting many hundreds of years; these occurred during the period between 32,000 and 10,000 years ago in Greenland (but not Antarctica). The most intense event, a cold snap lasting from 11,000 to 10,200 years ago during the end of the last ice age, was recorded in the flora of Europe but not North America (it is known as the Younger Dryas). These spikes are seen in ice cores but not deep-sea cores (worms churning the ocean floor serve to smooth the rapid fluctuations; this was discovered when the surface layers of the ocean floor gave radiometric dates of 3000 years old! The worms serve to average the last 6000 years. Having done pioneer studies of soil churning by worms, Charles Darwin presumably would have been amused.)

Mile 188 Cave art: See John E. Pfeiffer, The Creative Explosion, Harper and Row, New York (1982).

Immunological hazards of inbreeding are evident in the cheetah; all living individuals seem closely related, as if the present population sprang from only a few ancestors because of a bottleneck. See S.J. O'Brien et al, "Genetic basis for species vulnerability in the cheetah," Science 227:1428-1434 (22 March 1985).

Graham Hoyle, "Behavior in the light of identified neurons." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7:690-691 (December 1984).

Day 13

Mile 188 Whitmore Wash photo in Leydet, page 118.

Loren Eiseley, "Man and novelty," in Time and stratigraphy in the evolution of man, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, publ. 1469 (1967), pp.65-79.

H.G. Wells, "The discovery of the future." Nature 65:326 (1902).

Further slowing of developmental clock rates for further juvenilization, see lemur-chimp-human comparison in notes for Mile 145. If a doubling of human life span were desirable, halving the clock rates again would seem one possibility. See, however, Aldous Huxley's cautionary novel, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, Harper, New York (1939); it is briefly summarized by Ashley Montagu in Growing Young on pp.243-244.

Creative thinking via variations on existing schemata: See Kenneth Craik, The Nature of Explanation (Cambridge University Press, 1943), and Douglas R. Hofstadter, "Variations on a theme as the crux of creativity," in his Metamagical Themas (Basic Books, New York, 1985).

Mile 200 Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W.W. Norton (1981).

Loren Eiseley, "Man and novelty," in Time and stratigraphy in the evolution of man, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, publ. 1469 (1967), pp.65-79.

Mile 205 Larry Stevens, "A boatman's lessons," Plateau 53(3):24-28 (Summer 1981).

Penfield's sister: Adopted, with some liberties taken, from a lecture by Brenda Milner, Society for Neuroscience meeting, 1981. For a survey of frontal lobe research, see Trends in Neurosciences (November 1984).

Richard A. Muller, talk at Reality Club, New York City, 4 December 1985.

Derek de Solla Price, Science since Babylon, Yale University Press (1975).

Damaged nerve computer simulations reviewed by W. H. Calvin, "To spike or not to spike? Controlling the neuron's rhythm, preventing the ectopic beat." In: Abnormal Nerves and Muscles as Impulse Generators, edited by W. J. Culp and J. Ochoa. Pages 295-321. Oxford Univ. Press, New York (1982).

Mile 212 Tanzanian native quoted by Bunny McBride, "If people be killing killing...." Sierra Club Bulletin 70(2):67 (March 1985). Many languages intensify the verb by repeating it.

Lorenz epigram: this is the translation from the German provided in Eigen and Winkler's 1981 American edition, which I prefer to the inelegant translation of the same concluding passage in the American edition of Lorenz's book, Behind the Mirror (Harcount Brace Jovanovich, New York 1977).

Mile 220 Hippocrates. This is not from the Hippocratic Oath but from the aphorisms of his school.

John Gardner, On Moral Fiction, Basic Books, New York (1978).

Day 14

Mile 222 Purple sand, etc. Some of the dawn colors described here (and seen in Thurman's Mile 216 photograph may not be repeated regularly, as my notes were taken in July, 1982. Sunrise colors were affected by the El Chichón volcanic eruption in Mexico three months earlier, once the cloud had been around the world. Unusually brilliant and prolonged sunrises and sunsets were reported in Arizona beginning a month after the eruption; for some time, the sky was a whitish blue instead of its normal bright blue. Following such eruptions which inject aerosols into the upper atmosphere, sunsets typically begin with a lavender glow that appears high over the horizon and changes gradually to yellow and orange. After the sun sets, there is often a strong red afterglow (Day 8 sunset) that shades into purple higher above the horizon. See Michael R. Rampino and Stephen Self, "The atmospheric effects of El Chichón," Scientific American 250(1):56 (January 1984).

Postscript

John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion. Harcourt, New York (1932), pp.371-373.
These references were current in 1986. More recent ones can be found in my later books:


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