This passage is adapted from Ed Yong, Turtles Use the Earths Magnetic Field as

Global GPS. 2011 by Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Line 5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

In 1996, a loggerhead turtle called Adelita swam across 9,000 miles from Mexico
to Japan, crossing the entire Pacific on her way. Wallace J.
Nichols tracked this epic journey with a satellite tag. But Adelita herself had no
such technology at her disposal. How did she steer a route across two oceans to
find her destination?
Nathan Putman has the answer. By testing hatchling turtles in a special tank, he
has found that they can use the Earths magnetic field as their own Global
Positioning System (GPS). By sensing the field, they can work out both their
latitude and longitude and head in the right direction.
Putman works in the lab of Ken Lohmann, who has been studying the magnetic
abilities of loggerheads for over 20 years. In his lab at the University of North
Carolina, Lohmann places hatchlings in a large water tank surrounded by a large
grid of electromagnetic coils. In 1991, he found that the babies started in the
opposite direction if he used the coils to reverse the direction of the magnetic
field aroundthem. They could use the field as a compass to get their bearing.
Later, Lohmann showed that they can also use the magnetic field to work out
their position. For them, this is literally a matter of life or death. Hatchlings born
off the sea coast of Florida spend their early lives in the North Atlantic gyre, a
warm current that circles between North America and Africa. If theyre swept
towards the cold waters outside the gyre, they die. Their magnetic sense keeps
them safe.
Using his coil-surrounded tank, Lohmann could mimic the magnetic field at
different parts of the Earths surface. If he simulated the field at the northern
edge of the gyre, the hatchlings swam southwards. If he simulated the field at
the gyres southern edge, the turtles swam west-northwest. These experiments
showed that the turtles can usetheir magnetic sense to work out their latitude
their position on a north-south axis.Now, Putman has shown that they can also
determine their longitudetheir position on an east-west axis.
He tweaked his magnetic tanks to simulate the fields in two positions with the
same latitude at opposite ends of the Atlantic. If the field simulated the west
Atlantic near Puerto Rico, the turtles swam northeast. If the field matched that on
the east Atlantic near the Cape Verde Islands, the turtles swam southwest. In the
wild, both headings would keep them within the safe, warm embrace of the North
Atlantic gyre.
Before now, we knew that several animal migrants, from loggerheads to reed
warblers to sparrows, had some way of working out longitude, but no one knew
how.By keeping the turtles in the same conditions, with only the magnetic fields
around them changing, Putman clearly showed that they can use these fields to

find their way. In the wild, they might well also use other landmarks like the
position of the sea, sun and stars.
Putman thinks that the turtles work out their position using two features of the
Earths magnetic field that change over its surface. They can sense the fields
inclination, or the angle at which it dips towards the surface. At the poles, this
angle is roughly 90 degrees and at the equator, its roughly zero degrees. They
can also sense its intensity, which is strongest near the poles and weakest near
the Equator. Different parts of the world have unique combinations of these two
variables. Neither corresponds directly to either latitude or longitude, but
together, they provide a magnetic signature that tells the turtle where it is.
Orientation of Hatchling Loggerheads Tested in Magnetic Fields

Adapted from Nathan Putman, Courtney Endres, Catherine Lohmann, and

Kenneth Lohmann, Longitude Perception and Bicoordinate Magnetic Maps in Sea
Turtles. 2011 by Elsevier Inc.
Orientation of hatchling loggerheads tested in a magnetic field that simulates a
position at the west side of the Atlantic near Puerto Rico (left) and a position at
the east side of the Atlantic near the Cape Verde Islands (right). The arrow in
each circle indicates the mean direction that the group of hatchlings swam. Data
are plotted relative to geographic north

Natural Science
This passage is adapted from The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins ( 1976
Oxford University Press).
Most of what is unusual about man can be summed up in one word: "culture." I
use the word not in its snobbish sense, but as a scientist uses it. Cultural
transmission is analogous to genetic transmission in that,5 although basically
conservative, it can give rise to a form of evolution. Geoffrey Chaucer could not
hold a conversation with a modern Englishman, even though they are linked to

each other by an unbroken chain of some twenty generations of Englishmen,

each of whom
10 could speak to his immediate neighbors in the chain as a son speaks to his
father. Language seems to "evolve" by non-genetic means, and at a rate which is
orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution.
As an enthusiastic Darwinian, I have been dissatisfied 15 with explanations that
my fellow-enthusiasts have offered for human behavior. They have tried to look
for "biological advantages" in various attributes of human civilization. These
ideas are plausible as far as they go, but I find that they do not begin to square
20 up to the formidable challenge of explaining culture, cultural evolution, and
the immense differences between human cultures around the world. I think we
have got to start again and go right back to first principles. The argument I shall
advance is that, for an 25 understanding of the evolution of modern man, we
must begin by throwing out the gene as the sole basis of our ideas on evolution.
What, after all, is so special about genes The answer is that they are replicators.
But do we have to go 30 to distant worlds to find other kinds of replicators and
other kinds of evolution I think that a new kind of replicator has recently
emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy,
still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is 35 achieving
evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.
The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new
replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a
unit of 40 imitation. "Mimeme" comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a
monosyllable that sounds a bit like "gene." I hope my classicist friends will
forgive me if I abbreviate "mimeme" to meme. Examples of memes are tunes,
ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making 45 pots or of building
arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from
body to body, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping
from brain to brain. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it
on to his colleagues 50 and students. He mentions it in his articles and his
lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from
brain to brain.
Imitation, in the broad sense, is how memes can replicate. But just as not all
genes that can replicate do 55 so successfully, so some memes are more
successful in the meme-pool than others. The longevity of any one copy of a
meme is probably relatively unimportant, as it is for any one copy of a gene. The
copy of the tune "Auld Lang Syne" that exists in my brain will last only 60 for the
rest of my life. But I expect there will be copies of the same tune on paper and in
people's brains for centuries to come. If the meme is a scientific idea, its spread
will depend on how acceptable it is to the population of individual scientists; a
rough measure of its 65 survival value could be obtained by counting the number
of times it is referred to in successive years in scientific journals. If it is a popular
tune, its spread through the meme pool may be gauged by the number of people

heard whistling it in the streets. If it is a style 70 of women's shoe, the population

memeticist may use sales statistics from shoe shops.
Some memes, like some genes, achieve brilliant short-term success in spreading
rapidly, but do not last long in the meme pool. Popular songs and stiletto heels
75 are examples. Others may continue to propagate themselves for thousands of
years, usually because of the great potential permanence of written records.
When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes.
We were built as gene 80 machines, created to pass on our genes. But that
aspect of us will be forgotten in three generations. Your child, even your
grandchild, may bear a resemblance to you, perhaps in facial features, in a talent
for music, in the color of her hair. But as each generation passes, the
contribution 85 of your genes is halved. It does not take long to reach negligible
proportions. We should not seek immortality in reproduction.
But if you contribute to the world's culture, if you have a good idea, compose a
tune, invent a sparking 90 plug, write a poem, it may live on, intact, long after
your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a
gene or two alive in the world today, but who cares The meme-complexes of
Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still going 95 strong.
Excerpt, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote 1966
I. The Last To See Them Alive
The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a
lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there." Some seventy miles east of
the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear
air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The
local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the
men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled
boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely
extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as
gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.
Holcomb, too, can be seen from great distances. Not that there's much to see simply an aimless congregation of buildings divided in the center by the mainline tracks of the Santa Fe Rail-road, a haphazard hamlet bounded on the south
by a brown stretch of the Arkansas (pronounced "Ar-kan-sas") River, on the
north by a highway, Route 50, and on the east and west by prairie lands and
wheat fields. After rain, or when snowfalls thaw, the streets, unnamed,
unshaded, unpaved, turn from the thickest dust into the direst mud. At one end
of the town stands a stark old stucco structure, the roof of which supports an
electric sign - dance - but the dancing has ceased and the advertisement has
been dark for several years. Nearby is another building with an irrelevant sign,
this one in flaking gold on a dirty window - Holcomb bank. The bank closed in
1933, and its former counting rooms have been converted into apartments. It

is one of the town's two "apartment houses," the second being a ramshackle
mansion known, because a good part of the local school's faculty lives there, as
the Teacherage. But the majority of Holcomb's homes are one-story frame
affairs, with front porches.
Down by the depot, the postmistress, a gaunt woman who wears a rawhide
jacket and denims and cowboy boots, presides over a falling-apart post office.
The depot itself, with its peeling sulphur-colored paint, is equally melancholy;
the Chief, the Super-Chief, the El Capitan go by every day, but these
celebrated expresses never pause there. No passenger trains do - only an
occasional freight. Up on the highway, there are two filling stations, one of
which doubles as a meagerly supplied grocery store, while the other does extra
duty as a cafe - Hartman's Cafe, where Mrs. Hartman, the proprietress,
dispenses sandwiches, coffee, soft drinks, and 3 .2 beer. (Holcomb, like all the
rest of Kansas, is "dry.")
And that, really, is all. Unless you include, as one must, the Holcomb School, a
good-looking establishment, which reveals a circumstance that the appearance
of the community otherwise camouflages: that the parents who send their
children to this modern and ably staffed "consolidated" school - the grades go
from kindergarten through senior high, and a fleet of buses transport the
students, of which there are usually around three hundred and sixty, from as
far as sixteen miles away - are, in general, a prosperous people. Farm ranchers,
most of them, they are outdoor folk of very varied stock - German, Irish,
Norwegian, Mexican, Japanese. They raise cattle and sheep, grow wheat, milo,
grass seed, and sugar beets. Farming is always a chancy business, but in westera Kansas its practitioners consider themselves "born gamblers," for they
must contend with an extremely shallow precipitation (the annual average is
eighteen inches) and anguishing irrigation problems. However, the last seven
years have been years of droughtless beneficence. The farm ranchers in Finney
County, of which Holcomb is a part, have done well; money has been made not
from farming alone but also from the exploitation of plentiful natural-gas
resources, and its acquisition is reflected in the new school, the comfortable
interiors of the farmhouses, the steep and swollen grain elevators.
Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few American - in fact, few
Kansans - had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the
motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa
Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped
there. The inhabitants of the village, numbering two hundred and seventy,
were satisfied that this should be so, quite content to exist inside ordinary life to work, to hunt, to watch television, to attend school socials, choir practice,
meetings of the 4-H Club. But then, in the earliest hours of that morning in
November, a Sunday morning, certain foreign sounds impinged on the normal
nightly Holcomb noises - on the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of
scuttling tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive whistles. At the
time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them - four shotgun blasts that, all

told, ended six human lives. But afterward the townspeople, theretofore
sufficiently unfearful of each other to seldom trouble to lock their doors, found
fantasy recreating them over and again - those somber explosions that
stimulated fires of mistrust in the glare of which many old neighbors viewed
each other strangely, and as strangers.