Inner Nature: Merde!

By Vidya Rajan. Columnist, The Times Merde. In other words, s**t, p**p, d**g, number 2, BMs, excreta, droppings, stools, feces. This is not a really pleasant subject of conversation, or even a polite one (unless you lived back in the eighteenth century when everyone was apparently fascinated by it as an indicator of health). But it’s an important part of life. If you’ve ever been constipated or...

Inner Nature: Virgin Births

By Vidya Rajan, Columnist, The Times December seems a good time of year to bring up the topic of virgin births. Religion aside, this is actually an interesting and significant biological topic. Curiously, virgin births have been documented in all vertebrates with jaws with the exception of mammals. To be clear, the majority of organisms on this planet – single celled bacteria and protists – normally...

Inner Nature: Sentience

By Vidya Rajan, Columnist, The Times Two books released over the last two years: Lars Chittka’s “Mind of a Bee” and Stephen Buchmann’s “What a Bee Knows: Exploring the Thoughts, Memories and Personalities of Bees” have thrown into turmoil the question of sentience – the capacity for feelings – of honeybees, and whether we humans truly understand the capabilities of minds that operate...

Inner Nature: Poisonous and venomous animals

By Vidya Rajan, Columnist, The Times I am in India. It’s a vibrant and bustling place. This month, a couple of friends and I are planning a trip to a wildlife sanctuary in Southern India*. We hope to see tigers and a plethora of other animals and plants. What I am hoping we do not encounter closely are mosquitoes and snakes. I do not like mosquitoes, but I do like snakes, in principle. But many snakes...

Inner Nature: Gender — sex made visible

By Vidya Rajan, Columnist, The Times Charles Darwin concluded his seminal “Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” with this immortal paragraph: “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers,...

InnerNature: Sex — The key to diversity

By Vidya Rajan, Columnist, The Times In his book “Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea,” Carl Zimmer concedes: “Sex is not only unnecessary, but it ought to be a recipe for evolutionary disaster. For one thing, it is an inefficient way to reproduce…And sex carries other costs as well…By all rights, any group of animals that evolves sexual reproduction should be promptly outcompeted by nonsexual...

Inner Nature: Immunity — Autosurveillance

By Vidya Rajan, Columnist, The Times The immune system is the mechanism that protects and defends the body. Although its main purpose is defense against attack, the immune system is also a barrier, border patrol, soldier, police, doctor, parent, and amazingly, a fortune-teller, all in one package. Not only that, it exists in every living organism from bacteria to plants to animals to protect against...

Inner Nature: Digestion and food processing

By Vidja Rajan, Columnist, The Times The previous group of Inner Nature articles were loosely organized around how organisms sense the external environment using vision, sound, touch, taste and smell. What is most remarkable about this cluster of what appears to be completely different mechanisms is the profound underlying similarity. This similarity is due to the outcome of notionally different sensory...

Inner Nature: Metamorphosis – Buggy Development

By Vidya Rajan, Columnist, The Times The growth of a single cell from a fertilized egg, or zygote, to an adult composed of trillions of cells is amazing and magical. This process which scientists, with their knack for understatement, call “development” happens with most eukaryotic organisms – those that have cells with a nucleus and other membranous compartments. Nucleated eukaryotic cells are...