Not many people remember Loudon Wainwright’s 1972 masterpiece “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road” but we do and, oddly, it triggered some thoughts about one of the great theories of science. That is Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. One of us, Robert, has published several peer-reviewed journal articles about evolution in the fossil record and both of us can rightfully call ourselves evolutionary biologists. The dead skunk tune seems an unlikely lead-in to serious work about such important science, doesn’t it? But give us a chance; we are serious about this. And also, we have enlisted help from many of our facebook page members (perhaps you folks?) in doing the work that is about to unfold.
Scientific theories always begin with a scientist finding an interesting, even appealing question or puzzle. Then they gather all the pertinent information that they can find. Soon, it is only natural that they come up with one or more possible solutions. Each of these might be called hunches or educated guesses, but scientists like to call such ideas “working hypotheses.”
That puzzle is the starting point so let’s indeed start ours in this column. We recall that when we were growing up during the 1950’s and 1960’s that we saw dead woodchucks (AKA groundhogs) up and down all the many roads of northern New Jersey. But nowadays, we hardly ever see any. Why is that? That’s our question, our puzzle. Is there something to this?
We had long known that during the late 19th Century people routinely shot very large numbers of groundhogs, including one of our favorite authors, John Burroughs. He, famously, blasted away at his family home “Woodchuck Lodge” in Roxbury. Our grandparents told us that they had hardly ever seen any of them in the early 20th Century but that they started to get frequent, once again, in the 1920’s. So, simultaneously, both autos and groundhogs were becoming common during the middle 20th Century. A large population of groundhogs had evolved long ago, in the absence of cars, and now they were scurrying out onto the highways, completely oblivious to the danger. Big surprise: many, many of them died out there. That’s what we remember. Could that have completely done in the woodchucks?
That’s where Charles Darwin enters the story. Darwin’s theory makes a prediction. If there is a cohort of groundhogs that is wary of highways and cars, and if that wariness is genetic, then those animals will survive and as the generations pass by, they and their genes will be the ones who carry on the lineage. Road-wary groundhogs will evolve! Could it be that which has restored our modern large populations? Well, that was our hypothesis. This was not likely to become a foundational concept in broader evolutionary theory. In fact, it is a pretty goofy idea, but it just might be a fun idea for two scientists to toy around with. We scientists are like that.
But the second step of the scientific method is to learn as much as you can about the problem. And the third step is to develop alternative hypotheses. We needed help in these areas, so we went online to our facebook page, outlined our thinking and asked if people knew things and had alternative hypotheses. They did. Let’s come back next week and continue our journey into possible solutions. Sure, it is a goofy idea, but it is also a pretty good illustration of scientific thinking in action, something that is always important to the two of us in writing these columns.
Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.” Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.com.” But mostly run a search on Loudon Wainwright!
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