You are listening to season five of

Future Ecologies.

Before we start the show, we want to send a huge

thank you to our amazing community on Patreon. Future

Ecologies just wouldn't be possible without you, and we are

beyond grateful to have your support. We hope it's obvious

that every one of our episodes is a pretty considerable effort.

Every single patron means more ambitious stories, fair pay for

more guest producers, musicians, and other collaborators, and

gets us closer to a living wage to do what we love to do —

Making this show. We'd do it for free, if we could. But until

that day comes, we're relying on listeners like you.

We make this show because we think it has the potential to

make a real difference in the world. Maybe it's already made a

difference in yours. So to keep this podcast going and growing,

while staying ad free and independent. Join us at

futureecologies.net/patrons Okay, that's all. On to part two

of Spiders Song.

Welcome back. My name is Mendel.

And I'm Adam.

And this is Future Ecologies. Today, in

Spiders Song Part Two, we're taking our seats in the concert

hall of life — audience to the grand dance of evolution, with

taxonomist, phylogenetic theoretician, and jumping spider

devotee Wayne Maddison.

Hi. Good to be back.

In other words, we are jumping in right where we

left off.

So do you want to give us a quick recap?

Sure. Jumping spiders are basically like tiny,

eight legged, big eyed cats, slash birds of paradise — in

that there are bedazzled males that court mates by dancing. And

also by singing! In a manner of speaking... they vibrate.

Yeah, go on.

And not only are their species really diverse in

shape, and color, they also demonstrate a lot of convergent

evolutionary patterns, which are not limited to independently and

repeatedly developing color vision, ever more complex

courtship rituals, a bunch of them have become ant-like, and

there's something going on with their Y chromosomes.

Yeah, mostly. The Y chromosome thing is

actually just the one genus Habronattus, not all jumping

spiders. But it'll be important later on, I promise.

Where we left off in Part One, Wayne was overcome by his sense

of awe — that evolution isn't just an endless chaos of

diversity. It seems to cohere around certain patterns, motifs,

melodies, themes and variations. It seemed to him like the

grandest possible symphony. If only he could hear it.

And at first, I didn't know what to do with

that. But then I thought "Oh! I'm a computer programmer. I do

visualizations of change on phylogenetic trees. Why don't I

program a sonification of change on trees?"

I'm assuming what a visualization is to our eyes,

a sonification would be to our ears.

Yeah. sonification is like

transmogrifying data into sound. In the same way that you might

turn that same data into a graph. Sonification is the

auditory equivalent.

So last episode, we were figuratively talking

about how evolution is a form of music. And now you're talking

about literally making evolutionary patterns into

music.

Yeah, exactly. So, this practice of

sonification has been used to explore and communicate climate

data, X-ray astrophotography, prime numbers, and even

sequences of DNA itself.

But what Wayne is talking about here is sonifying a phylogeny —

an entire family tree of many organisms.

A phylogenetic tree is a statement about the

history of lineages in the past. And we can't actually go back in

a time machine and see those lineages, so we have to

reconstruct it. And we can reconstruct it with lots of

data, occasionally through fossils. But mostly nowadays, we

use genetic data to reconstruct these trees. And it's pretty

clear, we're doing a pretty good job of it, because we've got so

much data that's all speaking to the same phylogenetic tree. But

nonetheless, it's still a hypothesis.

So to draw a phylogenetic tree, they have to

gather specimens, sample their DNA, and assess them for

different characteristics, like which ones have Y chromosomes.

Then they use some of the statistical tools that Wayne

developed to create an estimate of who branched off from who,

and what the characteristics of those ancestors were most likely

to be.

So like, if a scientist took you and me, they

could cast back and figure out who our most recent common

ancestor was and what traits they might have had — based on

what you know about us, and maybe some fossils.

And some DNA.

Yeah and a computer program. Okay.

Yeah. So so after they've done that, they

have a sequence of all these different lineages, starting

from a common root, and then branching and changing through

time.

But what would it sound like? Would we hear

harmonies would we hear melodies clearly, and so forth? I didn't

know.

And as far as I could tell, although this world

of data sonification is growing really rapidly, the sonification

of phylogeny is unprecedented. Wayne's experiment would be a

world first.

I wanted this to have some basis of reality. So I

started with a real dataset of Habronattus.

Habronattus, also known as the paradise

jumping spiders, most of which are native to North America. And

the characteristics examined by that dataset were the various

sex chromosomes...

and the issues of the the chiasma localization.

... that is, that is not a term that I am familiar

with.

Okay, bear with me for one last piece of

cellular biology.

If we must.

Remember that you've got half of your chromosomes from each of

your parents, right?

Yes.

So well, most of the time, the chromosomes from

both contributors are paired up, but separate. But during

meiosis, the moment at which sperm or eggs are being

produced, the DNA from each pair of chromosomes is shuffled

together, swapping the copies of genes from either parent. That's

the actual moment of genetic recombination that gives you

variations.

Yeah, no, no, I'm, I am still with you.

So the chiasma is the crossover point along the

leg of the chromosome, where that swap takes place.

Got it! So if you're picturing these cute

little X chromosomes with their little dancing legs, right, four

legs, it's like, where is that spot where they cross over

And swap.

and swap their information. Yeah, okay.

Wayne had data that included the physical

measurements of where the chiasma was located for each of

these species of Habronattus jumping spiders. It might be

closer to the middle of the chromosome, or closer to the

end.

So we were looking for a correlation

between where the chiasmata occurred along the chromosome

and the evolution of the Y chromosome. And at first glance,

you might think "Well, why should those even be connected?

It's not as if you needed the chiasmata in a place to generate

the Y." So they seemed like two different aspects of the

chromosomes.

There had been a prediction that there should be some sort of

correlation in this case that you might expect to see when

there is a Y, the chiasmata would be more towards the tips

of the chromosomes. So that was before our study. And it turned

out that when we looked at it, that correlation is actually

there.

And in general, correlations like these are

exactly what evolutionary biologists are looking for —

puzzling out why when one feature is like this, another

feature tends to be like that. So Wayne decided to sonify this

family tree of Habronattus jumping spiders, comparing the

location of their chiasmata with the evolution of a new Y

chromosome.

So here's how it turned out. First, let's just

focus on the speciation events those points where lineages

diverge. Every time you hear a tone, that's a spider lineage

splitting in two.

The next layer has to do with the chiasmata, where they are in

the chromosomes. And because where they are in the

chromosomes is variable, like it's a continuous variable,

you're gonna hear the tone going up and down in different amounts

as the chiasmata slide up or down.

So, you know, at this point, I'm thinking "Hmm, I'm not... I'm

not really hearing any grand symphonies yet, it's sort of

intriguing, but it's not sounding particularly orderly to

me." But, you know, I went ahead and tried it now with the Y

chromosomes. So here, you're going to hear a little ping,

every time a Y chromosome evolves, and a second little

ping a different sort, if it actually reverses back to loss

of Y.

And now, here are all of them — the speciation events,

charismata, and the Y chromosome — all together.

I mean, I have heard 20th century classical music that

sounded a little bit like that, but it really wasn't the

symphony that I was expecting.

I mean, I think I enjoyed that, because I have a

love of John Carpenter horror movies from like the 70s, and

80s, and 90s.

And looking back, I can see that there were

a few things wrong with it. The first being how it starts

slowly, and then gets busier and busier and busier, as if

suddenly all sorts of extra things are happening.

Like it just gets exponentially louder and

denser, until it suddenly ends — which isn't really the shape of

most music that we tend to listen to.

No, not not mostly no.

So why do you think the data sounded like

that?

Well, speciation, right? Evolution tends to become

more complex over time. All of the phylogenetic trees that I

have ever seen begin with a single line, and split and split

and split and split and split until you've got an exponential

number more species than when you started. So yeah, it makes

perfect sense.

But remember that these trees are constructed

by calculating back from species that are still around today. So

what's missing?

I mean, we're missing all of the spiders that

have gone extinct.

Bingo.

Part of the problem with extinct lineages is

that we don't see them today. So we don't know exactly how many

there are in Habronattus. And there are no known fossils, it's

not like we can figure it out that way. But we can get an

estimate of how many there likely would have been. And so

one way to do this is to do a simulation of the dynamics of

branching and extinction. And we can sort of populate all those

lower parts of the tree where things went extinct. And that

would make it so that it was more even in terms of the

busyness all the way through.

And if you you know, if you were to simulate

those extinct lineages, it raises questions about whether

you'd want to be able to hear the difference between the real

and the imaginary ones. And in the end, with all of the various

branches, you still have to deal with a lot of overlapping sound.

The second thing that's wrong, well, there's

probably more than one here. But the second thing that's wrong is

that you're not able to really hear each of the voices and the

melody that it might be playing, because I'm using the same set

of notes all through the whole tree. And that what I really

needed to have done was somehow distinguish all these voices so

that you could hear them separately. So it was almost

like I should have said, okay, at the base of the tree at the

root, there was a divergence event. And that split between

the woodwinds and the strings, for instance. And then on the

lineage of strings, it split again between the bass and all

the smaller ones, and likewise on the woodwinds. And that

perhaps, if you had it so that the voices were distinguishable,

you could hear them as different, then you could more

easily hear the little melodies that were happening as chiasmata

and Y chromosome evolution followed each other. But I

realized, "Oh, this is going to take a lot more work than I'm

ready to do." There were lots of spiders waiting for me to study

them.

And so, four years ago, that's basically

where the story would have ended — with a beautiful metaphor, and

a not quite as beautiful sonification. And I wasn't

satisfied with that.

"I... I was wondering...

so I asked Wayne, if I could take my own spin at it.

"And sort of try to take it to the next step as part of this

project."

Sure, I think that could be fun.

And so I tried. But after a few very

enthusiastic but ultimately false starts, I too realized

that this was a way bigger project than I had anticipated.

Not least because at the time I, I didn't really know anything

about making music. But it was this project that was my

motivation to learn. And even while this project was on the

backburner, I fell in love with learning the patterns of music,

and with the principles of electronic synthesis. I fell in

love with making music just for its own sake.

I enjoy listening to the music you make.

Thank you. You know, looking back, I would say

that this was one of my Divide Creek moments. Like this story,

put me on a path. And I think I'll be on it for the rest of my

life.

I know that feeling. Yeah.

But the other part was that in order to make

it happen, I needed help. In fact, I needed a whole team.

Mendel that's called a band.

Well, allow me to introduce Duncan Geere.

Hello, what's up party people?

And Miriam Quick.

The previous slide where we have the phylogenetic

tree, does the horizontal axis represent time on a linear

scale? Or does it represent some other degree of change,

Duncan and Miriam are information

designers, and they're the hosts of a really wonderful podcast

that's completely dedicated to data sonification. That's called

Loud Numbers. Next,

There must have been a molecular clock.

This is Damian de Vienne, evolutionary

biologist at the University of Lyon.

So you have a branch length usually represent

the number of mutations that occur along these branch. And

then if you have a hypothesis of how fast mutation accumulates,

then you can transform that to time,

I did actually end up finding one other

precedent for phylogenetic sonification after Wayne's

original attempt. It wasn't exactly a piece of music, but

more like a proof of concept. Damien was a co author, along

with his friend, Henri,

We've done a little batch in pure data, which

was sort of a test just to see if it's possible to sonify trees

This is Henri Boutin, acoustic researcher at

like that.

IRCAM. That proof of concept that I found was really just a

side project between him and Damien.

We are friends since a lot of time. We used to

do music and things like that. But we've never, we've never

worked together. And this was the first opportunity to work

together.

And finally, local wizard slash generative

music researcher and PhD student, Simon Overstall.

Good morning.

Who joined me in Pacific timezone solidarity

whenever we met with our European collaborators.

I need another coffee now.

So what did you do with this incredible team of

people?

Well, I think it's probably better if I spare

you the prototypes and the meetings and the revisions, I'll

just jump straight to what we ended up with. Because just like

Wayne's version, I'm going to need to explain what you're

about to hear.

Yeah, all of the all of the best music requires

extensive exposition, and I am here for it.

Well, in this case, yes.

I'm all ears.

So here we're using the same underlying data

as Wayne. We've got these species of Habronattus jumping

spiders, we know the location of their chiasmata and whether or

not they have Y chromosomes. But the difference between our

interpretations starts with how we represent time.

Okay.

The tree itself is the same, and we're not

simulating any extinct species. We're just approaching playback

in kind of a different way.

But what do you mean by that?

So time still flows from the past to the

present. But to avoid that exponential cacophony of all the

parallel branches, we decided not to play all the lineages at

the same time,

Ah that makes sense. So what did you do

instead?

You can kind of think about it as a series of

Divide Creeks. We always start at the same place, like the

headwaters of the stream, the root of the tree.

The last common ancestor between all of these

species

Yeah, exactly. So we follow that one lineage

until at some point, it splits in two. Then we follow those two

branches. until they both reach the present day. And because the

scaling of time by branch length isn't linear, one branch will

probably reach its end before the other one. But once they've

both finished, we pause and cycle back to the beginning.

So it's basically that they're just two

voices at any single point. Got it. Okay.

And each of these trips from the root to the

two tips, represents approximately 5 million years of

evolution.

Wow. Okay. And how long does it take in like real

time.

It kind of depends on which branch are

listening to, but a few seconds to tens of seconds.

Got it.

Now, because we're only listening to the

branches of this tree one pair at a time, it takes a lot longer

to hear the whole thing. But I also think that makes it a lot

more musical.

Sure. But what are we actually hearing as we move

down the creek? So to speak.

So every time a lineage reaches a point of

speciation, where its path might have gone one way or another, it

plays a chord. Or more precisely, it plays an arpeggio.

Which is like a chord with all the notes spread out. And the

notes that are in that arpeggio depend on which daughter lineage

our current branch followed, either descending to the right

or to the left along the tree.

What do right and left mean in this situation?

So when you're drawing a phylogenetic tree, the

order of the branches, and really what's left and what's

right... it's all pretty much arbitrary. So this is just a way

of having a simple rule about the pitch of the notes that

makes each unique branching path, a unique melody.

Okay, yeah, left, right, one way, the other way.

One way, the other way.

And so each unique species plays out as a unique

series of notes.

Yeah. Yeah, they all start in the same place, but

eventually find themselves somewhere different.

So what is the rule? What are the actual notes

in that melody? What do they mean?

Well, the chord that you'll hear the arpeggio is

only ever at most four notes. And that's telling the story of

four generations. So the great great grandmother note is

forgotten. And the daughter note is added. Depending on that,

quote, unquote, direction of descendants, a daughter note

might be either a minor seventh above the pitch of its mother.

Or a perfect fifth below.

Okay, so as we go, we forget a little bit about our

ancestors. We may not know exactly what those species were,

or what their names were or what their dances were like.

Yeah. But we do still have some sense of where

we came from.

Yeah.

Who we came from.

Yeah.

Also, it's important that I point out that

the arpeggio isn't in order of oldest to youngest, it's just in

note order, either going up or down.

And if it's descending or ascending, then it

just gets put in its place. Okay.

And to keep things musical, the notes will

wrap to a four octave range.

Okay.

But the melody isn't actually the important

part.

That's what drummers tell me.

It's true. So in this case, it's really just

describing the shape of the tree. What we're trying to hear

is a correlation in the data, a connection between the evolution

of a Y chromosome and the location of the chiasmata —

these two seemingly unconnected aspects of jumping spider

biology.

Oh, yeah. Okay.

So what I want you to pay attention to is the

envelope of each note. That is, the shape of the sound — either

short, and plucky or long and sustained.

Right. Waaauwww. And what does the envelope tell

us?

That's the position of the chiasmata, those

crossover points on the chromosomes. The closer the

chiasma gets to the tip of the chromosome, the pluckier the

note.

Got it.

And the evolution of a new Y chromosome

is signaled by a few things as they arrive along the branch.

What you'll first hear is a triangle ringing out.

Then when you hear the arpeggio, you'll notice that the direction

will change from ascending to descending. So what I want you

to listen for is how often pluck your notes are arranged in a

descending arpeggio.

Remember the sound of a triangle is your cue that a Y chromosome

has arrived.

Okay. Will there be a quiz at the end?

No, you can just enjoy yourself.

Okay.

Anyhow, that's, that's the main correlation that

we were trying to listen for. But we didn't stop there. Next

we took Wayne's suggestion that the voices really ought to

evolve more than just in terms of melody, but also, timbre,

Timbre, so like the character of the sound. So

do they split into like the strings and the woodwinds? And

so on and so forth?

Well, not exactly.

So what I gather from all of that... is that

things are changing.

That's the case. The more the spiders mutate, the

more they sound like different instruments. And this is

actually like a way of describing the evolutionary

distance along a branch. And one thing I find interesting is how

suddenly these changes can sometimes happen. It could be an

artifact of how we've processed the data. But it also seems that

evolution can be a lot less gradual than we usually expect.

Yeah, that reminds me of a concept that we call

punctuated equilibrium, which is just that, like in evolution,

things sort of can stay very stable for quite some time. And

then suddenly, there's a bunch of fairly large changes, right?

The environment shifted dramatically in some way or

there was a development of some kind of mutation. And everything

happens all at once.

Exactly, yeah, it kind of comes out of nowhere.

And another kind of subtle thing you might notice is that where

the voices are positioned in stereo, mimics their location on

the tree. So you'll hear them moving around your head, as they

follow their branches, getting a little quieter as they go out

towards the tips.

Of course, of course, stereo can be part of

this, I didn't think of that.

So I hope you're wearing headphones.

Never listen to Future Ecologies without your

headphones.

We really appreciate it.

Lastly, to mark time, between each cycle of dividing creeks,

before we return to the root of the tree, you'll hear a short

clip of one of our spider friends singing.

We processed that through a synthesizer that models the

physics of a plucked string, providing a kind of drone for

the entire piece — as though the spiders themselves are

strumming.

So this is the spider playing a guitar, so to

speak. Wow.

That's majestic. I... I love that.

And now, Spiders Song, take two, in its entirety.

That is really cool. It's... it's really

beautiful. That's not at all what I would have expected. The

sense of how how rich are the spiders in these lineages comes

across, you know, it's it's not... it's... the multi

dimensionality of it becomes clear, right of all of this.

I feel like I want a whole collection of different

phylogenies sonified like this, and just put them on and let my

brain simmer

The thing that I'm trying to locate is whether

or not the pings... how they're connected with one another, and

they're occasional enough that it's hard to find them. Right,

that could just be because the data is not showing it clearly.

But the other thing is, then I also felt like, it was the sort

of thing just like any music — that there's a little bit of a

learning process as to how to hear a new sort of music, where

you start to be able to notice the pattern that you hadn't

noticed before, which actually is a lot like the way science

works, right? You know, you get started and you think that

there's no pattern there. And it's actually just that you're

not used to seeing it.

Thing about using statistics is that if you have the right sort

of data, lots of it, than you almost don't need statistics,

because it just like "well, there it is." But the more

subtle is the pattern, the fewer the replicates there are, the

more that processing and examining and sifting is

important to be able to actually recognize that signal there. And

I think in this case, yeah, there's probably a pattern here

between sex chromosome evolution and chiasma localization, but

it's not a ton of replicates. And it's just two features

talking to one another, so to speak.

On the other hand, that's when if you had something like, you

know, DNA sequence data across the genome or something, there's

probably a way to do it like, yeah, you'd still have to think

a lot about how to turn it into sound. But there are probably

things that once you get the right way to do it, you don't

need to learn anything to be able to hear the patterns,

right? It'll just jump right out at you.

So is that a symphony? No. And I think that's

okay. This isn't supposed to be the way we listen to phylogeny,

to the music of evolution. It's just a few ideas for how we

could. And if you want to build on this one, I'm making the

whole patch open-source. That'll be up on our website,

futureecologies.net

I can't wait to hear some spider remixes, or even some other

phylogenies put through this system.

Me neither. But, you know, maybe first, it's

worth asking, what's the point of this whole exercise?

I can totally be the person that asked that,

Mendel. What is the point?

So I guess I just want to make a distinction

that there are really two big types of sonification. And

across all of them, the goal is always to get the data to speak.

But in my case, the key is that I already knew the story that I

wanted to tell. And I wanted it to sound good, right? I wanted

it to be at least a little musical.

You wanted to tell a story and you wanted it to

sound good, which is why you make a podcast, presumably.

That's why we're here! And the data were going to

be there no matter what, right? And I realized that being able

to really hear them, to hear the meaning and the patterns was so

dependent on how I... how I tuned the whole system towards

those. But if I were actually trying to do science, to

discover something new, it would have been a completely different

exercise. And that's really the difference between the

explanatory and the exploratory.

So yeah, it sounds like, you know, to me that you

were interested in the challenge. You were interested

in developing your skills musically. And you were

interested in telling this really interesting story.

Yeah.

But, you know, devil's advocate over here. Does

this have any scientific utility, like, could data

sonification for phylogeny be useful?

For a lot of things we are still in an

exploratory mode, and we don't have the hypotheses yet there.

And, you know, maybe it'll turn out that you somehow tweak this

so that it handles genomes in a particular way, and it's

something to do with, I don't know the shapes of proteins or

something like that. And you start playing it, and people

start noticing patterns from the way it sounds that then turn

into testable ideas in the laboratory. And you could see

that with with genomic data as being a distinct possibility!

You know, in your sonification, like, just as with all science,

there has to be a little bit of imposition of our ideas. Because

if we don't have ideas that we're slightly imposing on

nature, we can't even make sense of it all, right? It's like,

this is a dialogue between the telling and the listening. And

you don't want to go too far, you don't want to have it to be

on your head — the set of ideas, or just your hypotheses with no

grounding, no listening to what nature is trying to tell us. But

you have to do that to some extent. And when the data are a

little bit sparse, or nature hasn't given you a lot of

replicates or something like that, yeah, then you're going to

be able to hear your own voice a little bit more strongly, and

nature's a little bit less. When you got tons of data, or there's

a really strong pattern there, then your voice is going to

start to fade a little bit, as it should, and you're going to

hear nature speak more clearly. But it's always going to be a

balance.

And you know, we can't remove ourselves from science, the

observer is always there. The preconceptions that the observer

has, will always be there. But hopefully, there'll be enough

listening that nature's always there whispering, to keep us at

least somewhat connected to reality.

This is, I don't know if it's tangent, but I

studied experimental film as my undergrad. I'm a film school

dropout. And I loved experimental film, not because I

would stare at it really hard. And think about it really hard.

And try to derive the meaning from all of the kind of madness

up there on the screen. No, I would sit there watching those

films, often late at night, in a lecture hall with very few

people in it. And I would just let them wash over me and allow

them to do things to my brain that other narrative, cinema

couldn't do, right? Because it's so programmed to tell you this

particular thing, or that particular thing. And I liked

that about this, that, you know, somebody has put effort

obviously into into making it beautiful, and to making it

comprehensible to us. But there's a lot of meaning in

there. And it's not at all clear exactly what it is from the

jump, you have to let it wash over you. And maybe we'll learn

something about the phylogeny of jumping spiders. Or maybe what,

you know, jumps out at us will be something entirely different.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be my brain in

the music of jumping spiders.

You're welcome. And yeah, the science is just

one part of it. I felt like my job was to honor the beauty of

these little spiders.

They are quite beautiful. I guess that raises

the question like these spiders have presumably evolved all of

these things to appeal to one another. Why do you think that

they're so captivating to us as well?

At some level, it's a coincidence, right? Like,

it's just happenstance that female jumping spiders seem to

respond to the same sort of things that we do, right, like

flashy colors, and interesting vibrations, just like us. So

male jumping spiders have evolved to be dazzling —

dazzling in ways that appeal to both of us. And I think, over

evolutionary time, jumping spiders are literally being

shaped by you might say, their own attention to beauty.

You know, science is typically defined by

the very rigorous style of testing that we do. But there's

the other half of that, which is the generation of ideas that we

then subsequently test. And that generation of ideas doesn't have

to come in any rigorous way it can come from anything. And an

attention to beauty, that's jostling the way we look at the

world. It's giving us surprises, it's helping us to notice things

that we would have never noticed. An attention to beauty

may make us think about nature in ways that generate... that

generate new ideas that we can then test, right. It's a source

of the creativity that allows science to proceed. So that

actually has a benefit on discovering truth.

Most things that I've discovered, either about the

spiders themselves, or about how we approach nature as

scientists, the methods we use, those have useful consequences.

You know, we'll learn about how the world works and that can

help us survive in fact. But a lot of my pursuit of science is

connected with this pursuit of beauty. It's... it's a

motivation. It's... in some ways, it's almost as if the

science is a byproduct.

You know, I fell in love with the beauty of the world. When I

looked at that jumping spider, Phiddy, I saw a part of myself

there, there was a sense of something in common. And I know

that I fell in love first with a jumping spider. But I also know

it could have been something else, it could have been a

fungus, it could have been a beetle, it could have been an

earthworm. I think if you look closely enough, you can really

fall in love with just about anything.

As I've gone around the world, and found these amazingly

beautiful spiders, many of which I know are not yet described by

scientists, I wonder, "Am I the first person to see this sort of

spider? Like, has anybody ever looked at this sort of spider

before." But at the same time, as I do that, I also wonder, "Am

I going to be the last to see them alive?" Because many of the

environments that we have out there are disappearing, the

forests are being cut down, habitat loss, and now climate

change is having an effect everywhere. As a scientist, I

think the loss of the species is a loss of data, of course — like

we won't be able to learn from them anymore. But it's also

simply a loss of beauty.

You know, you have to think about how we're going to turn

that around. And we could say, well, we need to do it because

of this. And we could sort of impose a sense of morally we

need to do this. But I don't think people tend to respond

well to an imposed ethics like that. In fact, I tend to think

that we don't choose what we want to do by our ethics, we

tend to retrofit our ethics to what we want to do. So if we're

really going to change the world, we have to basically

change what we care about, change our desires. We have to

fall in love with the planet. We have to fall in love with all

the beauty that's here. So as a scientist, I feel I have a moral

responsibility, not just to talk about results, but to talk about

beauty. I have to talk about more than the truths that I

uncover.

For all of us, scientists, musicians, and maybe

even jumping spiders — our sense of beauty is part of our

intrinsic motivation. Each of us, in our own way, witnesses

the world, and responds to it. Because there is no such thing

as beauty without an audience.

This series of Future Ecologies was produced by me, Mendel

Skulski, but not without help from so many others. Thanks to

my amazing sonification collaborators, Damien de Vienne,

Miriam Quick, Duncan Geere, Simon Overstall, and Henri

Boutin. And if you're into this sort of thing, then you'll love

Duncan and Miriam's podcast, Loud Numbers.

Thanks, of course, to my co host, Adam Huggins and our

guest, Wayne Maddison. Our sonification was produced in

Max/MSP using phylogenetic data gathered by Wayne Maddison and

Dr. Genevieve Leduc-Robert. For the source code, the full length

track, and to learn more about how it works, head to

futureecologies.net.

All of our supporters on Patreon will be getting even more behind

the scenes and other bonus content. To get access, join our

community at patreon.com/futureecologies.

All the jumping spider audio recordings you heard came

courtesy of Dr. Damian Elias and his lab at UC Berkeley.

Sonification examples came from Chris Chafe, the Chandra X-Ray

Observatory, Mark Evanstein, and Mark Temple.

Special thanks to Ruby Singh, Vincent van Haaff, Teo Kaye,

Erin Robinsong, Cait Hurley, Kieran Fanning, and to Lobe

Spatial Sound Studio — Kate de Lorme, Hannah Acton, Ian Wyatt,

Eric Chad, and Sev Shaban. And thanks to Leya Tess for the

amazing illustrations.

Funding for this series was provided by the Canada Council

for the Arts. But ongoing support for this podcast comes

from listeners just like you. To keep this show going. join our

community at patreon.com/futureecologies. And

if you like what we're doing, please just spread the word. It

really helps.

Till next time, thanks for listening.