Leonard Cockayne on genetic engineering in agriculture

Cockayne, L. 1919. Presidential Address. Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 51:485–496. (http://rsnz.natlib.govt.nz/volume/rsnz_51/rsnz_51_00_006340.html)

The back issues of the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand are now freely available online. I have been looking through some of the old publications of New Zealand's ecology greats, including the above presidential address by Leonard Cockayne.

In this presidential address, Cockayne makes the case for a strong investment in pure science in New Zealand. I was particularly struck by the following passage, in which Cockayne foresees the advent of genetic engineering and its potential value for plant breeding and agriculture. Keep in mind, while reading this, that it was written in 1919, just 19 years after Mendel's genetic experiments had been re-discovered, ten years after the words "gene", "genotype", and "phenotype" had been coined, a decade before the modern synthesis of evolution by natural selection, and almost 40 years before the genetic code was cracked.

"Our scientific duty as a nation is not only to apply to the best of our ability our present knowledge, but by means of purely academic investigations to discover further fundamental principles on which the greatly improved farming of the future will depend. Suppose, for example, such characters as we wished could be bestowed at will upon certain fodder plants or food plants—i.e., that the plant-breeder could by methods now unknown create exactly the plant suitable for a special environment, just as one can forge a special tool. Experiments of seemingly the most worthless kinds in genetics might lay the foundation for such knowledge, the value of which is beyond our wildest dreams."

The ghosts of Pacific avifauna

Diamond, J. 2007. Voices from Bird Bones. Science, 315:941–942. www.sciencemag.org (subscription required).

Jared Diamond reviews two recent publications on the Pacific's many extinct birds.

• "Extinct Birds of New Zealand" by Alan Tennyson and Paul Martinson (Te Papa Press, Wellington, New Zealand, 2006).


• "Extinction and Biogeography of Tropical Pacific Birds" by David W. Steadman (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2006).

The review of Tennyson and Martinson's attractive book is brief and complementary. "Martinson's gorgeously detailed paintings bring home the tragic loss of formerly breathing real animals in a way that descriptions of bones cannot achieve" (p. 941). Diamond presents it as a worthy companion to Trevor Worthy and Richard Holdaway's (2002) book, "The Lost World of the Moa".

"The New Zealand fossil avifauna is by far the most completely sampled in the world" (p. 941). Diamond is particularly fascinated by how the extinction of many of New Zealand's endemic birds was followed by a replacement by often related Australian species. He sees there being much to learn about the processes of community assembly from both the Pacific's prehistoric avifauna and the modern bird communities that have replaced them.

David Steadman's decades of excavations have revealed the details of how the Polynesian settlement of the Pacific Islands triggered a mass extinction of birds and other vertebrates. I well remember being stunned when I read Steadman's chapter in the 1997 book "Biodiversity II", with its description of the massive scale of bird extinctions in the Pacific following human arrival. Unfortunately, Diamond's opinion of Steadman's book is less than complementary, not due to any inaccuracies in the data behind the book, but rather regret at the superficial interpretation of this data. In Diamond's eyes, Steadman is stubbornly resistant to the modern analysis of his data and all the amazing things that could be learned from it. With the publication of "Extinction and Biogeography of Tropical Pacific Birds", this modern treatment may follow.

Darwin's visit to New Zealand, now online

Darwin, C. 1845. Journal of researches into the natural history and geology of the countries visited during the voyage of H.M.S. "Beagle" round the world, under the command of Capt. Fitz Roy, R.N. (8th edition, corrected and enlarged edition). Ward, Lock and Co, London, New York, and Melbourne. Electronic full text edition available at New Zealand Electronic Text Centre, www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-DarJour.html

Charles Darwin's voyage of the Beagle, including his less than flattering account of his visit to New Zealand in 1835, is now readily accessible in this full text electronic version freely available on the internet.

"I believe we were all glad to leave New Zealand. It is not a pleasant place. Amongst the natives there is absent that charming simplicity which is found in Tahiti; and the greater part of the English are the very refuse of society. Neither is the country itself attractive."