To Err Is Human, To Admit It Is Not and Other Essays

Thoughts on Criminal Justice, Health, Holidays, Nature, and the Universe

Steven N. Austad

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781666798654
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Essays

What simple practice could reduce fatal medical errors? Do juries make sense if the goal of criminal justice is to discover the truth? What are the alternatives? What kind of health studies should be taken seriously and what kinds should not? In this compendium of short, entertaining essays, Austad answers these very practical questions and others. Do we really become more foolish with age? Is there a limit to how long humans can live? He answers big questions you may not have known you had. What makes up the 95 percent of our universe that we can't see? Why do we think "natural" means good for us? He also provides tips on everyday living: how to survive a shark attack, how painful is a fire ant sting, and why opossums make poor pets. These seventy-seven essays cover topics on the workings of science, the history of life, the mysteries of the universe, and the puzzles of everyday life with wit, insight, and humor. Your questions are answered, and more intriguing questions raised. This is a book that will keep you awake at night... lost in thought.

V.

The Nature of Nature

Getting High Nature’s Way

Most of us are at least a little familiar with the challenges of climbing Mt. Everest, the world’s highest terrestrial peak—the months of training, weeks of acclimatization, temperatures seriously below zero, one-third as much oxygen in each breath as at sea level, snow streaming off the summit like smoke from life-threatening jet stream winds. And yet some hardy climbers with their guides, their Sherpa support team, their oxygen bottles, their high-tech tents and high-tech clothing struggle step by painful step to Everest’s summit. Amazing.

A lot more amazing to my mind though are the geese that fly by, or even over, the highest human climbers. These geese, bar-headed geese to be precise, don’t struggle to make the simplest movements at this altitude. Without training, without acclimatization, without special clothes or oxygen masks, beating their wings a steady 4-5 times per second hour after hour, they take off from sea level in India, climb nearly thirty thousand feet in altitude, and cross the highest Himalayas less than twenty-four hours later on their way to their Siberian breeding grounds.

Seeing birds every day, it is easy to forget how remarkable they are. The bar-headed goose, of course, is particularly remarkable for its high altitude endurance feats. Other birds perform equally amazing feats. A wading bird called the bar-tailed godwit flies nonstop for nine straight days and nights without re-fueling, that is without stopping to eat or drink, in a seven thousand mile migration from Alaska to New Zealand. That, by the way, is within shouting distance of the world’s longest nonstop commercial airline flight.

But even a standard-issue sparrow can perform physical feats that would humble the most highly trained human.

Take the house sparrow, for instance, the most common bird you are likely to see in cities in towns around the world, and compare it to the similar-sized house mouse, the most common rodent you are likely to find in your pantry around the world. Put each one in a chamber that can simulate the atmospheric conditions of different altitudes. At sea level, both are alert and inquisitive. Reducing the oxygen to the equivalent of an altitude of thirteen thousand feet makes the mouse lethargic but has no apparent effect on the sparrow. Incidentally, travelling from sea level to thirteen thousand feet within a few minutes would make you feel poorly as well.

Continue to reduce the chamber’s oxygen level and when it reaches the equivalent of twenty thousand feet altitude, the sparrow will still be perky and alert although its heart and breathing rates will have doubled to keep enough oxygen flowing to its brain and other organs. The mouse by this time is comatose. Its heart and breathing rates have both dropped dangerously. If not removed from the chamber, it will die.

The point is that you don’t have to climb the Himalayas to see amazing birds. They are around you daily. You just need to learn to appreciate them.

Which brings me to our hummingbird. I say “our hummingbird” because for those of us who live in the United States east of the Mississippi river anywhere from the Gulf coast to southern Canada, there is only one hummingbird species, the ruby-throated hummingbird, so named because of the males’ brilliantly iridescent red throat. Our hummingbird is tiny. It weighs just a bit more than a penny, no bigger than a large moth. It consumes a mostly liquid diet, nectar from flowers or your backyard feeder supplemented with the occasional insect.

The name hummingbird itself comes from the low-pitched hum they make in flight. The hum comes from their wing beats of up to seventy times per second in normal flight, which is about the vibration frequency of a low C note on a piano. Their wings are a barely visible blur. Hummingbirds are also unique in that, because they can flip their wings upside down, they can fly forward, backward, or even hover in mid-air.

When you see a bird in which the males are more ornately feathered than females, our hummingbird’s ruby throat, for instance, or the peacock’s elaborate tail, nature is telling you that the males take no part in parenting. So females are not looking for helpful partners when they mate in these species. They are looking for a provider of good genes for the chicks. Male hummingbirds make their genetic case by showing off. During incredible courtship displays of aerial agility, they dive, dip, and swoop, accelerating their wing beats at times up to two hundred times per second.

This remarkable hummingbird flight requires powerful muscles and massive amounts of energy. The pectoral or flight muscles comprise one-quarter of a hummingbird’s total weight. Per gram of muscle, they use energy at more than ten times the rate that elite human athletes use energy during intense exercise. Energy requires fuel, sugar and oxygen in this case. To meet their energy demands, hummingbirds drink up to several times their body weight in nectar each day, loading their blood with so much sugar that they would be dangerously diabetic if they were human. Oxygen is supplied by breathing two hundred fifty times per minute, faster than a dog pants, and passing that air through exceptionally efficient lungs. Oxygen- and sugar-loaded blood is pumped to their muscles, brain, and other tissues by a heart that is five times the size of ours relative to their size. That heart beats at a machinegun-like twenty times per second.

Because of these high energy needs, hummingbirds cannot go long periods without food. As flowers wilt and insects begin to disappear at the end of summer, our hummingbirds must head south. They winter in southern Mexico and Central America where flowers bloom and insects abound year-round.

Now comes perhaps their most remarkable feat. As they prepare for migration, they begin to pack on fuel in the form of fat. Within a couple of weeks, they turn from sleek athletes into butterballs, adding enough fat to double their body weight as they ready for a life-or-death flight. These tiny, moth-size birds now attempt to fly nonstop more than five hundred miles across the Gulf of Mexico. The trip takes about twenty hours if weather conditions are good and if the birds are in good enough condition to make it. If you’re keeping track that journey requires more than five million wingbeats in less than a day. The ones that do make it will have lost more than half their body weight in less than a day. Call it the Gulf crash diet. They not only take the weight off, they keep it off—at least for a few months.

Come spring, they will make the return journey. Bulking up again and losing it again in that dramatic ocean crossing. You might think that such an intense lifestyle would burn them out quickly, but some hummingbirds survive long enough to make that Gulf crossing nearly twenty times.

So the next time you see one of our hummingbirds pause a second and give a mental tip of the cap to one of nature’s most remarkable creatures.

The Remarkable Opossum

Unlike the cliché, familiarity doesn’t seem to breed contempt. It breeds indifference. Why else would we take so little interest in one of the most fascinating of America’s wildlife, the opossum?

That’s opossum with an “o” and that “o” is important. To be technically correct, it’s the Virginia, as in the State, opossum and that “Virginia” is important too. The Virginia opossum got this common name from its Algonquian Indian name “apasum,” meaning “white beast,” and from the state where it was first given an English name in the early 1600’s by Captain John Smith of the Jamestown Colony and Pocahontas fame.

The “o” is important because when British explorer James Cook, on his first voyage to Australia a century and a half after Captain Smith named them, encountered other cat-sized animals that nurtured their young in a pouch, his ship’s naturalist erroneously assumed they were the same, or at least similar, species and called them opossums too. It turns out that the Australian marsupials are not closely related to our opossums, so to prevent confusion, scientists now call all Australian species possums—no “o”—to distinguish them from our opossums.

The “Virginia” is important for another reason. Although we only have one marsupial species in the United States, more than seventy more species occur throughout Central and South America. So in addition to our Virginia opossum, there are mouse opossums, slender opossums, water opossums, pygmy opossums, and woolly opossums, not to mention fat-, short-, thick-, and bushy-tailed opossums, plus my favorite, four-eyed opossums.

They are all marsupials though, animals that give birth to still developing embryonic pups and rear them for months in a pouch. Virginia opossums are pregnant for only twelve days before giving birth to ten to fifty of these pups, each about the size of a large ant. In order to survive, these deaf, blind, hairless fetuses have to crawl unaided the inch or so from their mother’s birth canal into her pouch and find one of her thirteen nipples. As only 5-7 young are typically raised, many pups are lost along the way. For those lucky enough to find and attach to a nipple, their lips soon fuse together and for the next two months they remain continuously fastened to that nipple. If dislodged, they will be unable to re-attach and will die. Life is no picnic for an opossum pup.

By the time they are three to four months old, opossums have left the pouch for good and are on their own. Also by this time, they’ve acquired all those traits which make them such endearing creatures. They have all fifty of their teeth, most of any American mammal, which they use to eat your garbage, your pet’s food if you leave it outdoors, or just about any food that won’t eat them first. They have hind feet with opposable thumbs, and they are the only mammal native to the United States with a grasping prehensile tail.

Even as newly independent pups, they have all the intelligence they will ever have. What’s that, you say? Opossum intelligence? Yes, despite their undeserved reputation for stupidity and a brain that is only one-fifth the size of a cat’s, opossums are better at remembering where food is hidden than are dogs, cats, or rats.

Opossums are probably most famous for “playing ‘possum,” that is pretending to be dead when threatened. Actually, as someone who has live-trapped, tagged, and released hundreds of opossums, I can say with some authority that they are much more likely to hiss, growl, and flash those fifty teeth than they are to collapse in a heap and play dead. But for all their bluster, they are surprisingly hesitant to bite. They seldom bite pets and despite handl...