Great Tits and American Chemists

This week's Nature Bang on Radio 4 caught my attention, particularly because the point de départ was a study involvimg Great Tits,  my single  conquest in the birdsong  recognition stakes...

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(apart, of course from the easy and common Magpie and Jackdaw)
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.... The Great Tit's monotonous...  

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(Strictly, more often than not duotonous, although sometimes it replaces the second tone with a hoarse gasp...)
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...call is not uncommon hereabouts; and it's easily recognizable.

As is the bird

The study involved culture, and the influence of immigrants. It involved a puzzle (of course) and a number of micropopulations, each consisting of six birds. There was also a 'tutor bird', which had been trained to solve the puzzle the wrong way.

Left to themselves, the tits soon learnt the right way, and it entered their culture (incomers and new-borns picked it up). But when the tutor bird was introduced, the culture adopted the wrong way to solve the puzzle (there was still a solution, but not the most efficient one).

Then a couple of immigrants were introduced to the group, and the puzzle was solved more efficiently...

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(Conclusions about the costs/benefits of immigration are clear. I am reminded of Ruth Davidson's observation in this week's Today Podcast: she found it extraordinary that no political party, given the demographic facts of the UK's aging population and economic failure to thrive, was making the positive case for immigration. Nature Bang simply flagged this issue up as 'political'; flag-wise though, my colours are nailed to the mast: it's a no-brainer – the benefits of immigration vastly outweigh the costs.)

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... but the obvious conclusion ('immigrants introduce innovations') was found to be an over-simplification. It was not the incoming birds that introduced the innovation. The more experienced home-grown birds did that. But the wise old-timers, having found the right way, soon reverted to what they'd been trained to do. What the incomers did was recognize the improvement and – not feeling the weight of the dead hand of the misguided culture – adopt it as best practice. It then entered the culture, and was passed on to young birds

So it was with Great Tits. What about us? Nature Bang went on to consider  Jewish emigrés' influence on US organic chemistry.

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• Chemistry, because innovation is documented at the Patent Office. Not all innovations are patented, but in the world of Big Pharma  (for obvious financial reasons – innovations are either patented or not researched [so they don't happen in the first place]) they are. 

• Organic, because in the 1930s US inorganic chemistry was world-leading, but not organic (the warm/wet/messy stuff that involves life).

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Jewish organic chemists fleeing the Nazis (having been stripped of their livelihoods, though not yet their lives) brought new techniques and insights into the USA. And patents in organic chemistry boomed. But the new patents were not registered by the immigrants themselves. Young American scientists developed the immigrants' ideas.

 There was lots more in that edition of Nature Bang. Give it a go.

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