Science's Holy Grail: "The Final Theory"

This is the final piece that, along with the preceding two, complete the trilogy of posts I planned to write on the topic "Science, Knowledge and Religion". I wanted to understand why some of today's smart scientists, despite their better knowledge of how nature works, still embrace religion. This is not a matter of debate, but personal belief, or as Steven Weinberg calls it, "moral choice". Science cannot prove God does not exist, anymore than religion can prove he does. What science has shown however, quoting Laplace from the late 18^th century, that the "hypothesis of God" is not necessary for scientific progress.

The title should be more aptly called "Physics' Holy Grail", because by broad consensus physics appears to be the only science equipped to handle this quest. Loosely speaking, the "final theory", if ultimately found, should consist of a set of irreducible laws from which will follow a complete explanation of the Universe as we know it. This last italic is significant, because we should not lose sight of the fact that the objective of such a theory is to build a self-consistent description of our perceivable world. For example, if an experiment breaks a new ground, suitable theory must be developed that can successfully explain the experimental finding, while at the same time being consistent with everything that is known until now. If in addition, the theory is good enough to throw up some new predictions of its own, appropriate experiments must be carried out to test and validate these predictions. In either case, if successful, science will add another layer of self-consistency to our description of the world. In the limiting case if and when the final theory is reached, this chain of sequential progress towards the fundamental knowledge will cease. Of course, science will not grind to a halt, because so much is yet to be known even about our day to day life (predicting weather pattern jumps to mind, and there are other equally important and unsettled questions).

As is almost always the case with fundamental issues, physicists themselves are divided on whether it is at all possible to find a final theory (even to the protagonists it is still a dream, though they believe it is a gettable dream). I do not want to get drawn into this debate, because my interest is at the very boundary of human knowledge, a point I attempted to address in this post. I believe the search for the ultimate truth, for example, satisfactory answers to "is there a meaning or purpose of life (any life) and Universe", "what and why is death", "is there a reality outside our perception" and so on, cannot succeed without understanding the essence and limitation of human knowledge itself, not what is merely "unknown" but what is perhaps "unknowable". Assuming, hypothetically, we can find the physicist's Holy Grail, we will only reach the outer boundary of what we can know, given our own biological limitations defined by the five senses and a 3lb brain. Physics, with its strict adherence to the inanimate, is inherently incapable of addressing such human dimension of reality. Biology, on the other hand, is still young. The new science of complex systems that try to bring disparate scientific disciplines together, may hold some promise, but it is too early yet. I do believe however that science alone, and not God, is the only mean of getting there. May not be the current science, maybe a "super-science" that unifies the tenets of physics, biology and all other sciences.

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Science and Religion - some more thoughts

Yesterday one of my friends told me about Beyond Belief, which posted a recent Meeting where some of the world's leading minds got together to discuss current conflicts between science and religion. While listening to their arguments, it became clear to me that religion cannot be discussed without its historical context. Religion grew as the oldest belief system among early humans as they were struggling to survive in harsh conditions without the benefit of modern science. As Einstein wrote, "With primitive man it is above all fear that evokes religious notions - fear of hunger, wild beasts, sickness, death. Since at this stage of existence understanding of causal connections is usually poorly developed, the human mind creates illusory beings more or less analogous to itself on whose wills and actions these fearful happenings depend. Thus one tries to secure the favor of these beings by carrying out actions and offering sacrifices which, according to the tradition handed down from generation to generation, propitiate them or make them well disposed toward a mortal." Seen in this historical context, it is easy to identify today with Laplace's famous words in the late 18^th century, when asked by Napoleon how God fits into his voluminous thesis on celestial mechanics: "Sire, I have not needed that hypothesis". Science has greatly advanced our understanding of how nature works, and we can cope with many natural calamities using scientific knowledge alone without the need to invoke religion. Paraphrasing Steven Weinberg, "Religion is like an old maiden - she was perhaps nice when young, but now ugly". Of course, there is a significant fraction of the over 6 billion people in the world who still believe in a God, and science must own up responsibility to some degree for its failure in reaching out to them.

The question then is what makes today's smart scientists like Francis Collins turn to religion while at the same time pursuing a career in cutting-edge science. Or, why 7% among the fellows of National Academy of Sciences, the crème de la crème of American scientific establishment, still believe in a personal God. These people have over 200 years of advanced scientific knowledge compared to what Laplace ever had, and still find a need for religious faith. This point has not come across well in the Meeting, except in the talk by Neil deGrasse Tyson who merely pointed out the fact without offering a reason. I believe this has much to do with the inability of current science to answer some of the deep philosophical questions about life and Universe, a topic over which I went at some length in my last post.

Move on to Science's Holy Grail - "The Final Theory".

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Science, God and "Neurotheology"

Does God exist? Are scientific and spiritual pursuits fundamentally at odds with one another? Do people have an inherent propensity to be faithful to a "higher power"? These are some of the questions that have interested philosophers, scientists and laypeople alike for ages, and I am no exception. Being a scientist myself, I have spent many hours thinking about where my beliefs lay. Ultimately it all comes down to belief: many people, a substantial fraction of them scientists, believe that science alone can, and eventually will, answer all questions, and there is no need to invoke a transcendental Being as the ultimate cause. By contrast, many others, including a not-so-insignificant number of the scientists themselves, believe that science cannot answer deep questions such as the meaning and purpose of all life (human and non-human), what is life and is there an afterlife etc, and one must embark on a spiritual quest for an answer. There is a middle group of people, the philosophers, who have traditionally asked these questions without necessarily invoking spirituality. A major part of philosophy deals with the essence and limitation of human knowledge, and much of the modern philosophy is founded on the scientific understanding about ourselves.

For example, science tells us that our "perception" of the world is shaped by the five sensory inputs (via sense organs) - vision (eye), taste (mouth), smell (nose), sound (ear) and touch (skin). Therefore, our "understanding" of the Universe, which is achieved by processing these sensory informations in our brain, must also be limited by them. This remains true even when technological progress has broadened our visual and auditory capabilities to include ultra- and infra- ranges of frequencies, because they must still pass through detectors that convert them to human perceptual ranges. Take the extreme case of quantum mechanics, the triumph of 20^th century physics that has fueled much philosophical speculation. The energy-matter duality, or Bohr's famous Principle of Complementarity, says that at the smallest scale far below the human sensory resolution, an entity lives as both matter and energy (technically, they are called "particle" and "wave"). We would have never known of such a weird "quantum world", had it not been probed by ultra-sensitive instruments that allow us to see this world with our eyes. Theoretical advances, aided by deductive and inductive reasoning (without direct intervention of our sensory inputs), often outstrip experimental progress that relies on our interpretation of what we see and hear. But science does not rest until each and every theory is verified by experimental tests. This has been ingrained in the methodology of modern science: theory must conform with experiment/observation for the advancement of scientific knowledge.

Whether a quantum world, or for that matter anything that we see or hear or smell or taste or touch, really exists outside of our perception is a different philosophical debate altogether. We can at least agree that we know it exists because of our senses. Then we can perhaps appreciate that it is possible to have limits to what we can know. It is important to be aware of this boundary of our science-based knowledge, because only then can we objectively address the questions we began with. If we are indeed biologically limited - by our five senses and the finite brain capacity - in our understanding of ourselves and the world around us, then perhaps we can never answer the fundamental philosophical questions about life and death. This is akin to attempting to understand the whole from within, by being a part of the whole. To some they are not even the right questions to ask ("science does not care about the meaning or purpose of life"), but to me such a stance merely skirts the issue. People will ask these questions as long as human beings exist as a species, and the quest for a satisfactory answer will never cease.

So, does God exist? It is interesting to read what Dr. Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, has had to say about this yesterday. It is not uncommon for scientists to privately hold faith in God, but it is rare for a top-flight scientist to profess such faith on a public forum. Many (including myself) would share his lack of confidence in current science in answering deep questions about life, death and Universe, but some (me included) would balk at taking the "leap of faith" in embracing God as he did. There was a significant study reported the same day on whether human brain is structurally and functionally hard-wired for faith, in what is known as the budding field of "Neurotheology". It is not hard to imagine an evolutionary implication of such a structural modification, if it could help early humans in survival by inducing, for example, group behavior, as pointed out in the report.

To wrap up, I do not believe that science, at least in its present form, is capable of answering the fundamental questions about ourselves and the world we live in. We may know the answer some day, or we may never know. It is an interesting challenge to get as close to the truth as possible, and I do believe science is the only vehicle in this rewarding journey. I am an atheist in that I do not believe there is an anthropomorphic God "out there", whose sole purpose is to improve human life (at the cost of other lives, if necessary). I am also religious in the same sense Einstein was religious, and I share his belief in "Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings".

Go on to Science and Religion - some more thoughts.

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Cricket's second casualty

Cricket needs a serious reality check. Match fixing scandal few years ago dealt the first blow, and when we seemed to have come out of those dark times, greed has raised its ugly head again. And how. The murder of the coach of a national team, during the biggest cricketing event of the world, rocks the very foundation of faith in everything that is good about the game. What makes it even more sad is the stature of the victim - Bob Woolmer, the coach extraordinaire and a thorough gentleman by everyone's account who knew him personally and professionally. Well, maybe not by some who clearly stood to lose financially by his mere presence. These are early days yet, and details about the crime will no doubt emerge eventually. Details do not concern me anyway, and what I know up to now is enough to make me eschew, here and now, all ties with cricket, both national and international. The game has lost a great man on a single Saturday night, but its second casualty - the enormous following all over the world - may well be an enduring one.

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The art of surviving an ESA Meeting

Last week I was in Memphis, Tennessee, to attend the 91^st ESA (Ecological Society of America) Meeting. ESA Meetings are week-long events that are held early August each year, when thousands of practicing ecologists from all over USA and several other countries descend in a city to discuss findings and exchange ideas. The biggest convention hall is often leased for the duration to house so many people at the same time, and for a while the city almost takes on a different hue - you cannot throw a brick without hitting a scientist complete with a name tag and a tote bag emblazoned with the ESA logo. Memphis Meeting was my 5^th in the last 6 years, and as in the previous occasions I came out with a sense of fulfilment, and at the same time feeling suitably overwhelmed by the sheer vastness of the event. But this time I had better overall experience than before (besides the 11-hr drive from Florida to Tennessee, and back, through three other states - Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi - which was fun too), and here is how.

To give an idea of the size of this Meeting, there were a total of 1362 talks (including one by me) presented in a combined 32 hrs, and 767 posters displayed in 7-and-1/2 hrs, spread over a 5-day period that began 8AM August 7 (Monday) and ended 6:30PM August 11 (Friday). By rule one author can make only one presentation - either a talk or a poster - and therefore there were at least 2129 participants, in fact many more including ESA awardees and scientists who came for administrative and policy meetings, others who did not present anything, as well as press people covering for mass media (I do not have the exact number, but it could well exceed 3000). Each talk was allotted a very strict 20-minute slot (except a few that were 30-minute long), and so at any given time there were on average 14 simultaneous talks going on in different rooms. Because one cannot be in more than one place at the same time, an efficient plan on which talks to attend and which to miss is a must-have. Likewise, someone attempting to visit each and every poster would have only 35 seconds available per poster, which is often less than the time it takes to get past the title and abstract. And above all, there is the inevitable trade-off between the breadth of the subject matter and the depth of concentration - after a time, covering more talks/posters inversely correlates with the attention-span in each of them. (For the geeky-minded, I have a quantitative definition of an "attention-span": it is given by the natural time scale of the curve specifying the rate of intake of information versus time spent in a presentation; for example, in an exponentially falling curve the attention-span is the time taken for the rate of intake to drop by a factor of e^-1.)

Given such problem of plenty, how can one maximize the benefit of an ESA Meeting? The organizers themselves, acutely aware of the magnitude of the problem, provide an "itinerary planner" in the Meeting website every year. The planner helps a participant build a day-by-day and session-by-session list of talks and posters he plans to attend, days in advance and from the comfort of his home or office. All he has to do is take a print-out of this list to the Meeting, which can be a very useful navigational tool indeed. Talks and posters are grouped together under separate session themes based on their content; for instance, a morning session called "Disease Ecology" could contain under it a number of talks with the common theme of the dynamics of disease spread in a population or across species. Another session titled "Community Ecology", held at the same time and same day (and there are roughly 14 simultaneous sessions running at any given time!), can group together talks on the theme of community assembly and dynamics of multi-species interaction. Now, it often happens that not all talks in a session are equally interesting to me. I'd like to hop across several sessions and listen to a number of different talks. If two of them happen to coincide, I have no choice but maybe toss a coin or something. Otherwise, the itinerary planner comes to the rescue, and directs me to the appropriate floor and room number in going from one talk to another.

And this was what I used to do, running from floor to floor, and room to room, of the vast meeting hall in my quest of absorbing as much information as I humanly could. Until the Memphis Meeting, that is. What I realized later is that such session-hopping is not a very efficient way of employing my cerebral faculty. First, there is the physical aspect of so much running around, which can be quite distracting besides being tiring as well. Second, the mental hysteresis associated with context switching - it is not easy to quickly shift focus from an involved topic on community assembly to another on disease dynamics. Third, the same breadth vs. depth trade-off - my attention-span drops precipitously if I jump too much across sessions. Finally, the element of uncertainty in a talk - the author often deviates substantially from the abstract he originally submitted (5 months before the Meeting took place), and what looked interesting from the abstract may not hold up its billing in the presentation itself. Given all that, I decided for the Memphis Meeting that my best bet would be to stick to a session between breaks as much as possible, based on my interest in the broad theme rather than individual topics. For instance, I am interested in the disease dynamics in populations and communities, and this time I sat through most of the disease related sessions. As a result, there was less physical stress and context switching, and better focus on each talk - an overall improvement. Besides, this strategy yielded an unforeseen benefit - some talks in these sessions that did not look promising from their abstracts turned out to be pretty good indeed!

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cricket record=number+story

There was a cricinfo article on Jayawardene's batting prowess during his recent Test partnership record of 624 runs with Sangakkara, in which his own contribution was a mammoth 374 - highest by a Sri Lankan and only 26 runs shy of Lara's world record. I find the timing of the article interesting in the context of my last post on the fickle nature of a cricket record. Each cricket record is a sum total of two factors: a number that enters the record book, and a performance/talent that produces the number and is the stuff of the history book. Record books talk of only numbers and hide the real story behind those numbers, the performances as unique as the circumstances in which the records are made. For example, in that post I argued Graeme Pollock's career batting average of 60.97 runs - currently a record among all present and past cricketers who played at least 20 Tests (discounting Bradman's 99.94 that cannot be placed in any comparative setting) - as having benefited from his short playing career of only 23 Test matches. What I did not say, and no record book will say either, is that Bradman himself considered Pollock to be the finest left-handed batsman the game of cricket has ever produced. Or, take Kapil Dev's hurricane knock of 175 against Zimbabwe in the 1983 World Cup, a record then but now holds the 9^th place in record books. Consider the circumstance - top five batsmen already back in the pavilion with only 17 runs on board, and all seemed lost when Kapil stepped in and produced one of the greatest batting exhibits of all time in his 138-ball knock, a performance that played no small part in the team's eventual (and only) World Cup victory. These are the stories that separate cricket records from most other sports records. I mean, we do not get to read an article about how someone runs the fastest 100-meter or jumps the longest yard. Those are records without stories, and people do not talk about them once they are surpassed (except, maybe, Bob Beamon's long jump record of 1968 Olympics that I mentioned in my last post - we still remember it because this record stood unbeaten for 23 years, which is itself a record for track and field events). There is the cliché "form is temporary but class permanent", maybe we can adapt it for a cricket record: "number is temporary but story permanent".

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Another cricket record "made to be broken"

Today one more record in the Test cricket's history was made, or broken, depending on your point of view. Jayawardene and Sangakkara, best buddies on and off field in the Sri Lanka cricket team, scored 624 runs together for the 3rd wicket against South Africa, a record for any partnership by any team. In the process, Jayawardene achieved the personal milestone of scoring 4th highest individual aggregate of 374 runs (highest by a Sri Lankan). The partnership total overtook the earlier record of 576 set nine years ago by another Sri Lankan duo of the great Jayasuriya and Mahanama for the 2nd wicket stand against India (Jayasuriya scored the highest, until today, Sri Lankan individual score of 340 in that match). This is the recurring theme in cricket records, or any sport record for that matter. You create one record today that instantly propels you to cloud nine, and poof it goes tomorrow and you are another been-there-done-that fellow ruminating on past glory. There are statistical outliers - records so spectacular they stand the test of time - like Bob Beamon's world long jump record in 1968 Summer Olympics that stood for 23 years; or, more relevant for this topic, Bradman's career Test batting average of 99.94 that will probably remain unsurpassed. (These two performances have since been immortalized in the sports lore by two new adjectives "Beamonesque" and "Bradmanesque".)

So, how close are the current top cricket records to being toppled? Below are two small tables, for Test and ODI formats of the game, where I pulled together some of the commonly quoted world records and the number of performances that are within 5%, 10%, 15% and 20% of these records. I have included all present and past cricketers (except Bradman) to show the "clutter factor" of a record, which attempts to make the point that unless the record is an outlier (like Bradman's average) or a close one, it is likely to be broken sooner than later. I have disregarded names and other details about the results (they can be found here). For the Test averages I considered only those cricketers who played at least 20 Test matches; likewise, for ODI averages I included those who played at least 50 ODI matches.

Test
		Record	<=5%	<=10%	<=15%	<=20%
Batting	score	400	1	5	6	13
	career tot.	11505	1	3	4	4
	career avg.	60.97	8	14	21	35
	100's	35	1	3	4	4
	innings tot.	952	0	1	2	3
	partnership	624	0	1	1	1
Bowling	career wkts	685	0	1	1	1
	career avg.	15.54	0	2	3	3
ODI
		Record	<=5%	<=10%	<=15%	<=20%
Batting	score	194	4	9	17	24
	career tot.	14146	0	0	0	1
	career avg.	53.58	0	0	3	9
	strike rate	108.16	2	3	9	24
	innings tot.	443	2	2	5	16
	partnership	331	1	1	2	3
Bowling	career wkts	502	0	0	0	2
	career avg.	18.84	0	1	2	8

If we had listed Bradman's average 99.94 instead of Graeme Pollock's 60.97 in the third row of the Test table, succeeding numbers in that row would be all zeros - Bradman's record has a zero clutter and is a true outlier (Pollock's average, which is the next highest, barely makes the "<=40%" column). There are couple of close ones in the ODI table, for example Tendulkar's career aggregate of 14146 runs (and he is still playing), or Akram's aggregate of 502 wickets. They will eventually be surpassed, but may take quite awhile. By contrast, Saeed Anwar's highest ODI score of 194 runs has lot of clutter - there are 4 scores within 5% of it and 9 within 10% - and it may not be long before this record tumbles. Same is true for Afridi's ODI strike rate of 108.16, with the increasingly specialized techniques used today for power hitting. On the other hand, Pollock's Test average of 60.97 runs presents a conumdrum - on the face the record has the largest amount of clutter, but Pollock played only 23 Tests in his entire career before retiring in 1970. Today's cricketers often play more than 100 Test matches, and sustaining such high averages is quite difficult after so many games (the more matches one plays over a prolonged career, more he plays when out of form, which pushes his career average down). It is a testament to Dravid's stupendous consistency that after 104 Tests his average of 58.75 finds a place within 5% of Pollock's record, besides being a record itself among current batsmen (followed closely by Ponting's 58.22 after 105 matches, with Tendulkar's 55.39 after 132 Tests not too far behind). So, there is indeed a point to the cliché "records are meant to be broken". Today's tech-savvy coaches and managers with a slew of support staff and ultra-modern gadgetry have considerably narrowed the gap between the prodigy and the merely good, thereby creating a level playing field, and what is record today will be commonplace tomorrow. Or maybe not. Surpassing a record 20 or even 10 years later assumes that the format of the game stays the same. There used to be only Tests being played in Graeme Pollock's time, now ODI taps the pulse of the crowd, and it already looks like Twenty20 holds the promise of the future.

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Golden Ratio - how ubiquitous is it?

I recently read "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown, and was reminded of the so called "power of Φ (Phi)". The story begins with the curator of Louvre Museum leaving a code scrawled on the museum floor just before he was murdered. The code has a jumbled set of numbers, which when unscrambled gives the first few elements "1-1-2-3-5-8-13-21" of the famous Fibonacci series, discovered by Leonardo Fibonacci in the 12th century. The obvious thing about this series is that each number is the sum of the preceding two numbers. Its less obvious feature is that, as the series progresses, the ratio of a number and its immediate predecessor approaches another famous mathematical entity, the Golden Ratio Φ = (√5+1)/2 = 1.61803398874989...(the 1.5 billionth significant digit can be found here). The golden ratio has a much longer history, and is believed to have been first defined by Euclid in 300 BC. Of course, mere deciphering of the numbers does not reveal the cause or the perpetrator of the murder in the story; there are wheels within wheels, or rather, codes within codes, and you can read all about them in the rest of the 450-page novel. My interest here is in the claim often made about the surprising ubiquity of Φ in nature around us.

In the story itself, the male protagonist Robert Langdon recalls his favorite Harvard lecture in which he talks to a bunch of thoroughly impressed students about the instances where this "divine proportion" shows up:
1. Ratio of female-to-male honeybee numbers in a beehive.
2. Ratio of diameters of successive spirals in the shell of Nautilus (a marine mollusk).
3. Ratio of diameters of successive spirals in a Sunflower seed pattern.
4. Pinecone petals, leaf arrangements on plant stalks, insect segmentation,...
In a human body too, one sees Φ in the ratio of the lengths of
1. Head-to-toe and navel-to-toe.
2. Shoulder-to-fingertips and elbow-to-fingertips.
3. Hip-to-floor and knee-to-floor.
4. Finger joints, toes, spinal divisions,...so on and so forth.

But the novel is about a fictional story (barring "all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals"), and who chases facts in a fiction! However, there are numerous places where such evidences are talked about (just do a google on "golden ratio in nature", or click here for one such example). Leonardo Da Vinci was apparently so impressed that he himself discovered the list of Φ hidden within the human body.

While the list is certainly impressive, the claim is at best only approximately true, contrary to the exactitude typically associated with a mathematical number. Nature does not follow Number Theory, and natural systems always have wide variations around some mean value. Take the human body for example. No two human beings have identical lengths of the same part of their body, and these lengths are in fact continuously varying parameters of human anatomy (in evolutionary biology this is an example of a quantitative phenotype). The ratios mentioned in the above list can only approximate the value of Φ. But if this is true, then what about, say, the ratio of shoulder-to-elbow and elbow-to-fingertips? Suppose this ratio is some μ. If one looks hard enough, I am sure μ can be found to roughly hold in several other parts of the human body. In other words, Φ is about as fundamental to human anatomy as any μ, σ or ω.

Now take the first item in the list: the number of female and male honeybees in a beehive. There is interesting biology involved with this example, and Fibonacci himself supposedly noticed it. If an egg laid by a female bee hatches without being fertilized by a male, it produces a male bee (by a process known as parthenogenesis). On the other hand, if the egg is fertilized by a male bee, it hatches a female. Let us track the genealogy of a male bee. It has a single parent (1 female bee and 0 male bee), which has two parents (1 female and 1 male). The male again has a single female parent, and the female has male+female parents (2 females and 1 male). Each of the two females has a male+female parent pair and the male has one female parent (3 females and 2 males). Three females again have male+female parents each, and the two males have single female parent each (5 females and 3 males), ad infinitum. Going far back into the ancestry, we recover the golden ratio from the female-to-male numbers. Mathematically interesting, but again biologically approximate! In all beehives there are a large variation in the actual male-female ratios due to any number of stochastic factors. What about the other entries in the list? Same argument holds without exception: shell of a Nautilus or seed patterning in a Sunflower never describes perfect spirals, and their diameter ratios give only approximate Φ. These rough spirals are no mere coincidence though, but give evidence to Mother Nature's efficient design, for instance to optimize seed spacing in the Sunflower (see picture).

While writing this post I came across Devlin's Angle, and most of what I said here, he said only better. It is an interesting coincidence that we both start our piece with the same novel, which speaks of its popularity (thanks partly to the transatlantic copyright controversy that made national headlines not so long ago). My advice on if you should read the book: if you like thrillers that are thicker than your pinkie, get it from your local library (as I did) or get your dumb friend to buy it (I do not have dumb friends), but do not waste your dough.

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Admiral in the community

No, not a war and peace story, this is about my fish betta whom I call the "Admiral" because of its gorgeous blue color (see below). Admiral lives with an assortment of other tropical community fish in my fishtank. He is a "crowntail" male betta, so called because of the exaggerated fringes on his fins and tail that make him look aristocratic and pretty. They are known to be very aggressive, which makes keeping them in a community type tank together with other fish a challenge for aquarium hobbyists.

I have developed aquarium maintenance as a hobby only during the last three years. In the world of professional aquarists, who have been doing this sort of thing for many decades, I am but a wee novice. Moreover, my experience is limited to freshwater aquarium, which is much simpler to build and maintain than a marine aquarium with all those fancy coral and dazzling array of fish (most famous of them all is "Nemo", named after the Disney blockbluster that popularized this little beauty the world over). I have a 10 gallon tank at home (see above), in which I have been keeping a variety of tropical freshwater fish over these years. In the early stages they used to die off faster due to my inexperience, but now the average turnover has settled into a relatively sedate 8 months to 1 year.

Back to Admiral, with a bit of history. This fish originally hails from Thailand and Malaysia, and more than a century ago in the Siam province (in Thailand) Admiral's forefathers used to be the gladiators in the then locally popular sport of fish fight (that is how they got their more common name Siamese fighting fish). Bettas are fiercely territorial - if you put two males together, they will fight each other to death. The original betta were pale, less attractive and more muscular; later they were brought to the notice of the outside world, and people began cross-breeding different types of betta in order to create increasingly beautiful and exotic varieties. Crowntail species is the latest (and most expensive) of this breed, and my Admiral is a direct descendant of this august lineage. I picked him up from a local pet store about five months ago, and since then he is a happy resident along with fellow tankmates that include a school of three neon tetras and one glo-lite tetra (see them here), and a very shy oto.

Because bettas are so aggressive towards their own kind and others that resemble them, such as the fancy guppies with large and colorful fins, the trick is not to keep them in the same tank (unless you plan to breed betta, in which case one male should be put together with one or more females in a larger tank). Also they are territorial, and need bigger space than any other fish of similar size. Bettas face danger from other fish too. They are slow because of their large fins, and also quite picky about the type of meal they eat. As a result, betta is often outcompeted by the swifter fish in the tank, and can eventually starve to death. Moreover, there are some smaller and aggressive fin-nipping fish (such as danios) that enjoy taking nibbles out of the betta's glowing mane, and over time can stress it out. These are some of the reasons why it is so difficult to make betta share the tank with other fish. What I have done is to keep my betta with a safe mix of non-aggressive fish that prefer water at different depths, so that their territories do not overlap. This is no rocket science, but still fun to see it working at the first try. Betta, with its upturned mouth well adapted to pick off food from below the water surface, is the so called "top feeder". Neons have mouth at the front of their head that enables them to grab crumbs suspended in the water, and they are the "middle feeder". Oto (short for otoclinclus) is the least visible but funniest of them all. It has a mouth right underneath its head, perfectly suited to suck soft algae from the rocks and other debris at the bottom of the tank - they are the "bottom grazers". Otos are also nocturnal, and prefer hiding in some dark corner during the day. Such niche partitioning (which is a technical jargon, but not hard to follow) makes it possible to house them all in my relatively small tank. I am not done yet, and have plan to add other variety of fish later; for now, Admiral looks only too happy and majestic in his little world - don't you agree?

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Chick or Egg, which came first - a debate no more?

This famous question, whose origin can be traced far back into the Greek philosopher Plutarch's Moralia at the beginning of the first millennium, has been much used and abused over the course of the history since then. Finally, in a debate organized by Disney to promote the DVD launch of its film "Chicken Little", a team comprising a geneticist, a philosopher and a chicken farmer appears to have cracked the puzzle.

First, to clarify the debate itself - the egg of course refers to a chicken egg, and not any other egg such as an ostrich egg, else there is no debate to begin with. But what is the definition of a chicken egg? There are in fact three definitions. First, an egg from which a chicken is hatched. Second, an egg laid by a mother hen. And third, an egg laid by a hen from which a chick is born. There seems to be no doubt about the first definition. And if one also assumes the second, then the third definition is redundant. The first two definitions toegther, however, gives rise to the circularity, and hence, the debate on which came first. So, in order to break the circularity, one of them must have been wrong when the first chick or the first egg appeared. But which one?

Therein comes Darwin's evolution (what else?) to the rescue, and a simple fact of genetics. The answer seems to be almost straightforward in hindsight. Evolution teaches us that all species, including our chicken, derived (or speciated, using technical jargon) from an ancestral species. And genetics tell us that an individual's genetic makeup does not change during its lifetime. Therefore, the ancestral "pre-chicken" individual could not have metamorphosed into a modern hen as it was growing up, and instead the changes must have happened within the egg during the earliest stages of embryonic development, when rapid chromosomal mixing was taking place. To put it simply, the first chicken egg was laid, not by a hen, but by a "pre-hen". And therefore, egg came first, and the chicken followed.

The argument might still appear preposterous to many were it not for a sobering fact of evolution, which is the underlying continuity of changes as a species moves up its evolutionary ladder. (There are glaring exceptions, as the huge gaps in the fossil records stretching back to a few billion years bear testimony to, but that is a whole different story). We humans did not arrive overnight from tree-hopping monkeys, but progressed through a series of intermediate species over millions of years. Likewise, the ancestor of the hen might have been quite like the hen itself, and probably did not even spot the odd chick as it mingled happily with the rest of its nestlings.

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