Newsday (Suffolk Edition) from Melville, New York • 135

rr Ki44l'4l K44 tf lTl (4 Util i JV 4 I 1-4 4 ll 4 Zt- 1 -S--- -Jr- Anthropology ASTRONOMY Death Star Nemesis By Lois Wingcrson -I i "ERES a deliciously ominous thought: As you sit innocently reading the death star Nemesis could be circling our sun sweeping irrevocably toward the catastrophe that will end life as we know it sometime around AD 15 million Unlike the usual popular controversy in science this one has all the advantages: cosmic and final enous' fortab the Los Alamos National Laboratory almost wistfiil about the attacks on Nemesis recently published in the British science Journal Nature "You set them all together and very difficult to believe Nemesis exists not impossible but The theory arose earlier this year after two University of Chicago geophysicists David Raup and John Sepkoski Jr revealed the results of their exhaustive study of the death dates of about 3500 families of marine animals They found a regular 26-million-year cycle of mass extinctions In one such case the disappearance 38 million years ago all the evidence points to a catastrophe which they believe may have been caused fay Nemesis At least three-quarters of all species on the Earth at the time died out with the dinosaurs according to fossil evidence Walter Alvares and others from the University of California at Berkeley have found high levels of the element iridium rare on Earth but abundant in asteroids in rock samples from that period They argue that asteroid collisions with the Earth raised tremendous dust storms changed the climate and wiped out millions of species Then also in Nature astronomers provided two reasons why the Earth might be subject to comet showers It could be that the solar system oecillates i and down through the Milky Way (the galactic I PboMlUa Mm Margaret Mead among the Manus In 1 928 aha la honored In a now hall at the Museum of Natural History b) and at certain periods has increased contact with stars and asteroids Alternatively the sun could have a companion star probably an invisible "black dwarf 1ms than a tenth the size of sun revolving around it cross section of the said museum register Paul Beelitx who worked on the Pacific hall Bateson said that Mead and her second husband New Zealand anthropologist Reo Fortune first went to New Guinea and the Admiralty Islands in 1928 specifically to challenge a then-popular but erroneous assumption that the thinking of primitive peoples was like the thinking of children "So I set out to find out what primitive children were Meade wrote of her and study of the' Manus people who lived in a lagoon society on stilts that centered around trading with diatant islands Called Piyap or "Woman of the West" by the Manus Mead asked in her preface to the 1975 edition of "Growing Up in New "How did they learn to be adults? Was their thinking the same as that of all children everywhere as psychologists were postulating?" It was second book and the first anthropological study of young growth in a primitive society That study was made before she learned that her first controversial work "Coming of Age in had become a best seller Although the quality of her first fieldwork in Samoa has been questioned in recent years by some anthropologists overall importance as a great cultural anthropologist is secure according to her biographers Mead herself had said that her work with Samoan adolescent girls taught her that she needed to study preadolescents in order to understand adolescents and adults She was not then as certain as her husband- jJ: By Michael Unget- I 1 1 0 latticework of island archi- rj pelagos spread across the southern Pacific 8-foot3 woman weighing less than 100 jy' pounds came in 1925 to make her living and her Joa reputation in anthropology recording the ways other people live 'Now 60 years later long after she had become I' the most famous cultural anthropologist in the world Margaret last contribution to the museum where she made her professional home is ty open to the public and named in her honor the Margaret Mead Hall of Pacific Peoples at the American Museum of Natural History "She felt it was immensely important to have complete records of alternative daughter Mary Catherine Bateson said in an interview "Each culture was a unique solution to the problems of human existence As we live in a changing world as constantly addressing new problems as technology opens new ways of living to us important to have as broad a rec-'P -s ord as possible of the human range" said Bateson 'who literally followed in her footsteps in Melanesia and is a professor of anthropology at Amherst College Bateson was invited to lecture at the museum Friday night about her contributions and her own recollections detailed in "With a her intimate memoir of Mead her third husband anthropologist Gregory Bateson and friends colleagues and lovers such as great teacher and mentor anthropologist Ruth Benedict As our dark companion swings direction according to the theory it passe Ahrough a belt of comets surrounding the solar system Its massive gravitational pull rips thousands of comets out of orbit and scatters them in our direction During a "death lasting a million years at least 20 such comets would strike the Earth probably with more than the impact of a massive nuclear ex- plosion each time The discussion has resumed in Nature and now the evidence shows Nemesis "quite incapable of producing the sequence of extinction events for which it was originally according to a commentary mathematical simulations show that Nemesis would be very likely to enter the orbits of the outer planets which would cause a catastrophe of truly cosmic proportions he said destroying the outer three or four planets in the solar system which happened is 1984 DIscovery3 Two other American researchers argue that for Nemesis to cause comet showers on Earth every 30 million years or so its orbit would have to be almost aligned to the galactic plane If so nearby stars and molecular clouds would certainly disrupt its orbit And two British astronomers argue that the infiu- ence of molecular clouds and stars would be several hundred timM larger than needed to "eject the companion star from the Solar In other words if Nemesis ever existed it is probably long gone If Nemesis does exist we may already have evidence of its existence because it would give off infrared signals The satellite IRAS (InfraRed Astronomical Satellite) circled the Earth for nine months gathering infrared signals Thus Nemisis may be found there among 250000 objects recorded in the data If there is no death star then what does cause the cycle of extinctions? The explanation could still lie in the oscillation of the solar system Or some geologists believe it could lie on Earth itself in changes in the sea level the climate and the nature continent vOJK collaborator Fortune that the way in which children were reared made very little difference to what they became in the end that society always won It was only later she wrote after she had returned to New Guinea and studied "the different ways in which cultures patterned the expected behavior of males and that Mead came to an understanding in her book "Sex and of how society shapes role behavior Mead and other anthropologists who studied Pacific cultures in the 1920s and 1930s counted themselves and their timing fortunate "I had caught' the people at a moment in Mead wrote "after warfare had vanished (but World War had not begun) before the missions had reached them and I knew that before long the winds of change blowing inexorably from the west would change their lives forever? "Oceania is an incredibly rich and diverse Bateson said "There are probably more different cultures each represented by relatively small 'groups of people than in any other place in the ry The peoples of New Guinea ana the nearby nv1 Admiralty Islands where her mother gathered ma-ii-j terial on her second field trip developed more than yi 500 different cultures and dialects "And each has its own customs and religious Bateson sj said Throughout her career Mead was concerned with the relationship between the individual yfj and the culture how it molded a person through life and how it related to American society Col-lecting material things during her field trips was not one of her main interests museum officials said "Anthropologists are less interested in esthetics and more interested in the complete.