ABLEnews Extra

                        Grasping Life
          
     [The following file may be freq'd as BL50221.* from
     1:109/909 and other BBS's that carry the ABLEFiles
     Distribution Network (AFDN) and--for about one week--
     ftp'd from FTP.FIDONET.ORG on the Internet. Please
     allow a few days for processing.]
          
Davis, CA--Running his fingers across a shell, whether the rocky spire
of a 400-million-year-old fossil or the glassy dome of a modern-day
cowry, Geerat Vermeij is quietly reading tales from the history of
life. Examining the shells' punctured armor, he sees every detail of
their encounters with predators and their close scrapes with death or
final agony.
   
Yet at the same time Vermeij sees nothing at all, because he is blind.
   
Born with glaucoma and never able to make out more than fuzzy shapes,
Vermeij (pronounced Ver-MAY), a paleontologist whose colleagues call
him Gary, has been completely blind since the age of 3 and has never
really seen a single creature, living or fossil.
   
Yet by using his fingers to feel both the damage on shells as well as
the girth and power of the claws and jaws that attack them, this
professor at the University of California, Davis has found evidence of
an ancient arms race.
   
According to the histories recorded on these broken and mended
fortresses, mollusks appear to have evolved evermore rugged armor to
protect their delicate flesh just as their predators developed more
vicious weaponry.
   
"Gary is a brilliant guy, an idea man, a synthesizer," said David
Jablonski, a leading paleontologist at the University of Chicago.
"It's very easy to think about how a predatory snail will catch a clam
and kill it. But how does that play out over millions of years of
ecological time? Gary is the guy who has really dug into that. His
observations have swept the field and will still be cited 100 years
from now. We should all be so lucky."
   
Researchers say paleontologists have typically ignored ecological
interactions like predation, many focusing instead on how large-scale,
physical factors like climate change shape life in the fossil record.
   
Vermeij's views have forced them to rethink the importance of animals
in shaping each other's evolutionary fates. Researchers say Vermeij's
findings are among the foundations of the emerging field of
paleoecology.
   
When meeting Vermeij, one is struck by an air of spareness. Born in
the Netherlands and raised in New Jersey, this thin, almost gaunt
48-year-old man holds a visitor's attention with his quiet voice and a
direct if unseeing gaze. His office likewise has a spartan feel,
filled only with papers and boxes of shells, leaving the visitor to
wonder how it is that this man who cannot see can manage to be an
evolutionary biologist, a teacher, the editor of Evolution, the
field's foremost journal, a MacArthur Fellow, an obsessive shell
collector, a world-traveled explorer and a field naturalist.
   
But within these walls, sight is entirely superfluous. Data can be
taken by touch. Voluminous books can be tapped out in sheaves of
Braille pages. Words meant for the sighted can be written on a
typewriter and the voice of a person reading can allow the perusal of
anything ever written.
   
But it is the observation and exploration of the living world that
would appear to be the most difficult hurdle for Vermeij.
   
Instead, researchers say it is the greatest strength of this keen
natural historian, who has worked in such places as Guam, Africa, New
Zealand and Panama and who at times has strayed far from his beloved
shells to publish on such diverse topics as leaf shape and the
evolution of birds.
   
In fact, he is famous for the invention of what amounts to a unique
method for observing the natural world. When biologists disembark on
new shores, it is largely their eyes that inform them.
   
Life is what can be seen. But for Vermeij, life is what can be
grasped, with hand or foot, and examined in every other way.
   
"I listen and smell and feel," said Vermeij, a man who would seem to
like nothing better than for you to forget that he is blind and who
strikes a triumphant note when recounting tales of exploring
snake-filled swamps and wading neck-deep in oceans swimming with
sharks and stingrays. "I've stuck my hands into more holes and under
more rocks than I care to mention, but my feeling is if you want to
experience nature you've got to be unconstrained."
   
Researchers describe his ability to see with his hands as "phenomenal"
and say that it is what makes Vermeij's view of evolution as
convincing as it is unique.
   
Colleagues recount in awestruck tones his ability to feel differences
among shells, quickly identifying them down to the level of
subspecies. They tell tales of his exploring new habitats more
thoroughly and with more insight than most seeing biologists.
   
Warren Allmon, director of the Paleontological Research Institution in
Ithaca, N.Y., described an experience escorting Vermeij to visit a
fossil bed in Florida that Allmon had previously spent countless hours
studying.
   
"He stood there for maybe 45 minutes feeling it," said Allmon, "and
then proceeded to tell me almost everything there was to know about
it--the fighting conchs, the percent covered with barnacles, a layer
of oysters. Now if I took you there and said, `Look right here. See
the layer?' you still wouldn't see it. I was trying not to show my
amazement since I had heard this about him, but I was really blown
away by that. He can do things with his hands that most of us can't do
with our eyes."
   
Throughout his career, Vermeij has had to cope with opposition from
people who doubted that a blind shell enthusiast could become a
scientist.
   
The list runs from government officials who initially refused to give
him scholarship money to hire readers so he could study biology at
Princeton, to the faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park
who gave him a trial position before allowing him to assume a
tenure-track job.
   
In an interview for graduate school at Yale University, a biology
professor made him submit to a practical test.
   
"He asked me how I could possibly read the literature, how I could
possibly do this, that and the other thing," Vermeij said. "He decided
that the clincher would be for me to fail at the thing I was supposed
to be the best at, shells. So he took me down to the Yale Peabody
Museum collection. He pulled out a couple of shells and asked me what
they were and I got them right, fortunately. I am forever grateful to
someone flexible who, like any good scientist, can change his or her
mind."
   
After a short time talking to a person who has accomplished all he set
out to do without the aid of sight, one soon begins to come to
Vermeij's opinion that blindness, in itself, is a rather dull point of
discussion. Self-described as a "lifelong opponent of affirmative
action" for all minorities, he takes as harshly unsentimental a view
of the blind as he does of the evolution of life.
   
"I am a strong disbeliever in seeing things from the point of view of
being handicapped, gender, race and all the rest of it," said Vermeij,
who explains that he hurried through Princeton and Yale in three years
each on full scholarships so as not to be a "parasite."

"All my life I have fought hard to integrate into society and I think
that's the way any minority group should work," he said. "If you give
people preferential treatment, others will always say, `Ah well, he
got this because he's blind.' You can never live that down. The idea
is to eliminate the barriers to the point that nobody will care."
   
And perhaps, in his case, that point has been reached.
   
"With anyone who's apart any way from the norm you notice it at
first," Gould said. "But after a while, he's just Gary."

[Blind Paleontologist Observer the Fossil World Through Keen Sense of
Touch, Carol Kaesuk Yoon, San Jose Mercury New, February 21, 1995]

          A Fidonet-backbone echo featuring
          disability/medical news and  information,
          ABLEnews is carried by more than 460 BBSs in
          the US,  Canada, Australia, Great Britain,
          Greece, New Zealand, and Sweden. The echo,
          available from Fidonet and Planet Connect, is
          gated to the ADANet, FamilyNet, and World
          Message Exchange networks.
                                     
          ABLEnews text files--including our digests Of
          Note and MedNotes (suitable for bulletin use)
          are disseminated via the ABLEfile
          Distribution Network, available from the
          filebone, Planet Connect, and ftp.
          fidonet.org

...For further information, contact CURE, 812 Stephen St.,
Berkeley Springs, WV 25411. 304-258-LIFE/258-5433
(earl.appleby@deafworld.com)
