What Do Psychology, City Neighborhoods and Dinosaurs Have in Common? Prof. Frederick Makes the Connection
April 24, 2018
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Michael J. Frederick, an assistant professor in the Division of Applied Behavioral Science at the University of Baltimore, is receiving worldwide attention for a paper he helped publish in February, on the counterintutive theory known as "biotic revenge."
"We got picked up by a lot of tabloid-ish newspapers," says Frederick. "We've also gotten some interest from researchers, both professional and amateur, who have some complementary or alternative theories."
Various articles in media around the globe addressed the idea, including Tech Times, Inverse and International Business Times. More attention is coming soon.
There's good reason for all the buzz. In the paper, published by Frederick and his former professor, Gordon G. Gallup, Jr., from the Department of Psychology at the University at Albany-SUNY, a theory called the biotic revenge hypothesis is proposed, which describes a slow kill-off of dinosaur species by food poisoning.
The hypothesis doesn't negate other more popular extinction theories, most of which claim that an asteroid impact that formed the Chicxulub Crater, plus volcanic eruptions in the Deccan Traps, created unlivable conditions for larger animal species, especiall dinosaurs. But fossil records point to a decline in population and variety of species for years prior to those events. According to paleontologists, dinosaur extinction stretched across a seven-million-year period—a period which was also marked by an increase in new toxins in flowering plants.
Biotic revenge isn't exactly a new concept. In 1976, the biologist Tony Swain, who was very familiar with plant chemistry, noted that the tortoises he fed in the London Zoo were less able to notice plant alkaloids than the mammals. From that observation, he extrapolated that if those types of chemical compounds first started appearing in plants, dinosaurs might not have been able to detect them either.
"It led to some interesting but inconclusive research on reptilian taste buds," Prof. Frederick says. "The focus was on their ability to actually taste these poisons."
Although this theory was published in the journal of the Linnean Society of London, an organization dedicated to the study of evolution, taxonomy, and natural history, within the mainstream it gained little traction.
But a decade later, in 1986, a paleontologist from the University of Reading named Beverly Halstead wrote a letter in The Scientist titled "Revenge of the Soft Scientists," as a defense for what he called the "woolly" sciences (in which he included his own field of paleontology). As an example of conflict between hard and soft sciences, Halstead explained that paleontologists were, by and large, not impressed with the explanation that an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs—that complications to the theory proposed by paleontologists frustrated and even angered Luis Alvarez, the physicist who originally proposed it.
Gallup must have seen this letter, because a month later he wrote a letter with Susan D. Suarez in the Department of Psychology at Oneota College-SUNY in response. Rather than taking a side in the hypothetical argument between physics and paleontology, however, they were more interested in the example presented by Halstead of an incomplete extinction theory. They attempted to produce a possible solution—one which pointed to Swain's ideas and added to them the benefit of contemporary psychological research. Gallup and Suarez's letter in The Scientist ended with the following sentence: "Rather than being a byproduct of a biotic crisis, perhaps dinosaur extinction was the result of a biotic revenge."
Much like the path of the idea that led to the theory—which traveled from reptilian taste buds, to overly defensive paleontologists, before finally landing on vengeful flowers—Prof. Frederick's journey to writing about dinosaur extinction was anything but direct, and certainly unpredictable. As a behavioral scientist focused on maladaptive behavior, Frederick's plan, when he first came to Baltimore, was to study how the characteristics of a neighborhood during childhood effect behavior into adulthood.
"I did some data collection where participants were reporting their childhood address. We had some individuals that were from Baltimore and Baltimore County, we would map that, and then use census data to try and look at the features of their neighborhoods," he says.
The study soon ran into trouble, however, when they realized that the data didn't go back far enough to make accurate or consistent conclusions.
"Another issue is that the way they carve up the city into neighborhoods doesn't really match real neighborhoods or communities, which change over time."
Frederick then decided to switch to self-reporting of individual childhood conditions, rather than on a neighborhood-to-neighborhood basis. His current study looks at capillary samples of participants so that cortisol and interleukin 6 levels can be tested as a measure of lifetime stress, which can be used to gauge harshness of living.
This work falls under a field of psychological study called history theory, which looks through the life of an individual for an explanation for different psychological traits.
"It explains these quirks in behavior that seem maladaptive, but then when you really lay them out and think about it there's this underlying logic that does make sense," Frederick says.
While Frederick was in grad school, he worked closely with Gallup, who would later bring him on board to help research and publish the biotic revenge hypothesis.
"When I was in grad school, we would have weekly meetings that were basically brainstorm sessions based on an article or even an email that Gordon had received using the basic ideas of evolution and biology," says Frederick. "We weren't afraid to brainstorm up ideas."
Although Gallup had participated in some research connected to the letter he wrote in The Scientist, which looked at taste aversion in caimans, the idea didn't really go anywhere until, Frederick says, his mentor wanted something new to talk about.
"Eventually I think he was kind of tired of giving the same lecture, or keynote guest lecture, over and over again, so he decided to change it up and go back to the dinosaur idea," Frederick explains.
"I thought it was cool," he says, recalling the first time he heard the phrase biotic revenge. "Plants spread over the planet first, and for a little while they owned it. Then animals came and just feasted on them, the whole world was a salad bar. The animals just kept eating them and eating them. At some point they fought back."
According to Frederick, there's more work that can be done to solidify the theory.
"There's the potential to find remnants of toxic plants in fossilized dinosaur guts—that would be really powerful—and certainly in the plants themselves. We know that flowers were emerging, and we think the alkaloid toxins were developed around that time or spreading, but certainly more evidence on that would be good," he says.
"It's a hypothesis that flows into testable predictions that we can actually look at. If [future studies] help us explain our observations a little better that's a step forward, and if not, well, we explored it and ruled it out. Either way I'll be happy."
Read the Biotic Revenge Hypothesis.
Learn more about UB Prof. Michael J. Frederick.
Learn more about the Division of Applied Behavioral Sciences.
Article by Kyle Fierstien, an undergraduate English major specializing in professional writing.