Reading Test 04
The Burgess Shale fossils
Fauna vanished with a whimper, not a bang
Some discoveries are so unusual it takes decades and sometimes even centuries to understand their full significance. One such discovery is the fossil bed known as the ago. It was discovered in the Canadian Rockies over a century ago and was popularised in 1989 in a book, Wonderful Life, by Stephen Jay Gould, an American palaeontologist.
The Burgess Shale fossils were created at a time when the future Canadian land mass was situated near the Earth’s equator. The creatures were preserved when an entire marine ecosystem was buried in mud that eventually hardened and became exposed hundreds of millions of years later in an outcrop of the Rocky Mountains. American palaeontologist Charles Walcott, following reports of fabulous fossil finds by construction workers on Canadian railways who were digging in the mountains in the late 19th century, is said to have tripped over a block of shale in 1909 that revealed the area’s remarkable supply of specimens. It has long been believed that the curious fauna that lived there vanished in a series of extinction because the fossil record ends abruptly, but that no longer appears to be the case.
The Burgess Shale began to form soon after a period of time known as the Cambrian explosion, when most major groups of complex animals arose over a surprisingly short period. Before 560m years ago, most living things were either individual cells or simple colonies of cells. Then, and for reasons that remain a mystery, life massively diversified and became ever more complex as the rate of evolution increased. An unusual feature of the Burgess Shale is that it is one of the earliest fossil beds to contain impressions of the soft body parts alongside the remains of bones and shells, which is highly unusual.
Although the fossil bed was discovered on a mountain, these animals originally existed below an ocean, the bed of which was later pushed up to create the Rockies. Nobody knows exactly why they were so well preserved. One possibility is that the creatures were buried quickly and in conditions that were hostile to the bacteria that cause decomposition of soft body parts.
Those that first worked on the Burgess Shale, unearthing 65,000 specimens over a 14-year period up to 1924, assumed that the fossils came from extinct members of groups of animals in existence today. This turned out to be misleading because many of the creatures are so unusual that they are still difficult to classify.
One such example is Opabinia, a creature that grew to about 8cm (3 inches), had five eyes, a body that was a series of lobes, a tail in the shape of a fan and that ate using a long proboscis. The proboscis had a set of grasping claws on the end, with which it grabbed food and stuffed it into its mouth. Nectocaris, meanwhile, could be mistaken for a leech, with fins and tentacles. Weirdest of all was Hallucigenia, described by palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris when he re-examined Walcott’s specimens in 1979. With its multiplicity of spines and tentacles, little about Hallucigenia made sense. Like an abstract painting, its orientation is a mystery at first, making it difficult to work out which way up it went, which hole food went into, and which hole food came out of.
Palaeontologists had long thought that many of the Burgess Shale animals were examples of experiments in evolution. In other words, entirely new forms of life that did not survive or lead to other groups or species. Hallucigenia, ironically, turned out to be the exception that proved the rule. It is now thought to be an ancestor of the modern group of arthropods, which includes everything from flies and butterflies to centipedes and crabs.
Now another misconception has been quashed. Writing in Nature, Peter Van Roy of Yale University and his colleagues suggest that the sudden absence of such crazy soft-bodied fossils does not indicate a mass extinction, but merely an end to the unusual local circumstances that caused the creatures to be preserved. In an area of the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, Van Roy’s team of researchers have found another diverse (and sometimes bizarre) assemblage of soft-bodied organisms from a period after the Burgess Shale was formed. One discovery includes something that may be a stalked barnacle. This suggests that the evolution of such complex life went on uninterrupted. For its part, the Burgess Shale continues to produce an astonishing array of indefinable creatures faster than palaeontologists can examine them. The world still has plenty to learn about this wonderful life.
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Undoing our Emotions
A.
Three generations ago, 180 young women wrote essays describing why they wanted to join a convent (a religious community of nuns). Years later, a team of psychological researchers came across these autobiographies in the convent’s archives. The researchers were seeking material to confirm earlier studies hinting at a link between having a good vocabulary in youth and a low risk of Alzheimer’s disease in old age. What they found was even more amazing. The researchers found that, although the young women were in their early twenties when they wrote their essays, the emotions expressed in these writings were predictive of how long they would live: those with upbeat autobiographies lived more than ten years longer than those whose language was more neutral. Deborah Danner, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky who spearheaded the study, noted that the results were particularly striking because all members of the convent lived similar lifestyles, eliminating many variables that normally make it difficult to interpret longevity studies. “It was a phenomenal finding,” she says. “A researcher gets a finding like that maybe once in a lifetime.” However, she points out that no one has been able to determine why positive emotions might have such life-extending effects.
B.
Barbara Fredrickson, Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan, believes that part of the answer is the ‘undo effect’. According to this theory, positive emotions help you live longer by shutting down the effects of negative ones. Fredrickson’s theory begins with the observation that negative emotions, like fear and stress, enhance our flight-or-fight response to very real threats. However, even when the emergency is gone, negative emotions produce lingering effects. Brooks Gump, a stress researcher at the State University of New York, explains that one of these effects is excessive cardiovascular reactivity. Behaviourally, Gump says, this reactivity is related to excessive vigilance: the state of being constantly on guard for potential dangers. Not only is it physically draining to live in a perpetual state of high vigilance, but high cardiovascular reactivity could be linked to increased chances of a heart attack.
C.
Fredrickson believes positive emotions work their magic by producing a rapid unwinding of pent-up tension, restoring the system to normal. People who quickly bounce back from stress often speed the process by harnessing such emotions as amusement, interest, excitement, or happiness, she says. To test her theory, Fredrickson told a group of student volunteers that they had only a few minutes to prepare a speech that would be critiqued by experts. After letting the students get nervous about that, Fredrickson then told them they wouldn’t actually have to deliver their speeches. She monitored heart rates and blood pressure. Not surprisingly, all students got nervous about their speeches, but those who viewed the experiment with good-humoured excitement saw their heart rates return to normal much more quickly than those who were angry about being fooled. In a second experiment, Fredrickson reported that even those who normally were slow to bounce back could be coached to recover more quickly by being told to view the experiment as a challenge, rather than a threat.
D.
Fredrickson believes that positive emotions make people more flexible and creative. Negative emotions, she says, give a heightened sense of detail that makes us hypersensitive to minute clues related to the source of a threat. But that also produces “tunnel vision” in which we ignore anything unrelated to the danger. Fredrickson speculated that just as positive emotions can undo the cardiovascular effects of negative ones, they may also reverse the attention-narrowing effects of negative feelings: broadening our perspectives.
E.
To verify her theory, Fredrickson showed a group of students some film clips—some saw frightening clips, some saw humorous ones or peaceful ones. They then did a matching test in which they were shown a simple drawing and asked which of two other drawings it most resembled. The drawings were designed so that people would tend to give one answer if they focused on details, and another answer if they focused on the big picture. The results confirmed Fredrickson’s suspicion that positive emotions affect our perceptions. Students who had seen the humorous or peaceful clips were more likely to match objects according to broad impressions.
F.
This fits with the role that positive emotions might have played in early human tribes, Fredrickson says. Negative emotions provided focus, which was important for surviving in life-or-death situations, but the ability to feel positive emotions was of long-term value because it opened the mind to new ideas. Humour is a good example of this. She says: “The emotions are transient, but the resources are durable. If you build a friendship through being playful, that friendship is a lasting resource.” So while the good feelings may pass, the friendship remains. On an individual level, Fredrickson’s theory also says that taking time to do things that make you feel happy isn’t simply self-indulgent. Not only are these emotions good for the individual, but they are also good for society.
G.
Other researchers are intrigued by Fredrickson’s findings. Susan Folkman, of the University of California, has spent two decades studying how people cope with long-term stresses such as bereavement, or caring for a chronically ill child. Contrary to what one might expect, she says, these people frequently experience positive emotions. “These emotions aren’t there by accident,” she adds. “‘Mother Nature doesn’t work that way. I think that they give a person time out from the intense stress to restore their resources and keep going. This is very consistent with Fredrickson’s work.”
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Children’s literature studies today
Who studies children’s literature and what is it that they study? The answers to this question are complex and messy, because of the many confounding factors which exist in this field.
Firstly, unlike literature for adults, children’s literature is not generally written by its own readers. Adults write for children, and thus adult perceptions of what children are and of what they could and should be become woven into the literature.
Furthermore, some of those who study children’s literature (and those who write certain kinds of children’s books) are less interested in literary values than in the kinds of lessons it can teach—either in terms of creating better children or in terms of serving a particular curriculum. The issue of how a teacher can use a children’s book is often contentious, but even outside the classroom, much material for children is still didactic.
Thirdly, while almost all literature is currently promoted within a strong commercial matrix, children’s literature is often especially targeted for marketing initiatives. This fact means that readers are often recruited with a message that is negligibly literary and significantly oriented to ideas of consumption. Daniel Hade (2002) has raised useful questions about whether children’s experience of reading is altered when their books are part of a larger marketing framework involving the movie, the game, and the toy of a popular children’s book. How children perceive and respond to their stories in this new context is an important question.
It is also important to note that texts in an ever-increasing range of new media compete with print media for the attention of the child reader, and create definitional issues for scholars. Does the term literature exclusively imply a verbal text? If not, where are the limits? Could a literary computer game ever be considered a work of literature? If not, what kind of attention should be paid to it, since children themselves undoubtedly perceive their print literature as part of a broader continuum? The internet provides one forum through which children now communicate with each other. (In 2003, the internet search engine Google listed 7,920,000 sites relating to the Harry Potter novels; even allowing for duplication and dead ends, that is a number with revolutionary implications.)
Finally, in the context of the higher education institutions where the formal study of children’s literature is often located, at least three disciplinary frameworks (English, education, and librarianship) fragment the focus of scholarly study of children’s literature.
How is the value of the imaginative encounter with the work of literature sustained and honored among such a welter of conflicting interests? One route through this maze is to ask the child readers for help. As David Lewis (2001) has perceptively noted, what children think of reading is not usually the same as what adults think, whether teachers or parents. As Lewis points out, children “sometimes see more and they often see differently”. If those who study reading can explore children’s perceptions as well as those of adults, their understanding of the nature of reading will be enhanced.
Lewis makes a further valid point when he adds that exploring children’s perceptions is usually justified for educational reasons: “It is true that a better understanding of how children read and how they learn to read, is a prerequisite to improved approaches to teaching. However, it can also be argued, as Lewis rightly does, that when children’s responses to literature are accessed and interpreted, they frequently lead to an understanding of how picture books appeal to children.”
Young people’s accounts of what and how they read also enable a more sophisticated description of many of the complex processes involved in reading. All descriptions of reading run the risk of solipsism: i.e. this is how I read so this is what reading is for everyone. Asking other readers how they read, however, reduces that risk. For example, if I am a strong visualizer as I read, I may consider that visualization is a key component of successful reading and I may judge books by their capacity to evoke a vivid visual response. Other readers, however, may help me to realize that not everyone reads with mental pictures. Some readers respond to the patterns of the words, “hearing” them inaudibly like a subliminal radio program. Others respond to the patterns of feelings in the story, responding with an emotional connection. Talking to competent readers, of all ages, provides a better understanding of reading experiences.
Children’s insights are even more important when it comes to understanding the significance of print literature as one aspect of literary culture. Too often adults assume that reading any book at all is a more worthwhile experience than playing a digital game of any kind. A humbler approach would include asking why the game appeals to the player. Many adults will probably never develop the automatic skills to process a game as readily as they can read a book. This does not indicate that a book is better, but that a particular set of skills is absent. Non-players must acknowledge that some fictional universes are thus closed to them, and a logical response would be to find someone who can guide them to the pleasures and challenges of the gaming world. Games need to be judged individually just as books do, and any evaluative framework needs to take this into account.
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