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In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell published the first of several bestsellers, ‘The Tipping Point’, in which he applied the laws of epidemics to promote positive social change. Now he has returned to the lessons of that optimistic book in ‘Revenge of the Tipping Point’ (to be published on October 1 by Little, Brown & Co.), to explore the downside of these theories.
The topics of the new book range from cheetah reproduction and the Harvard women’s rugby team to the Holocaust.
Read the excerpt below and Don’t miss David Pogue’s interview with Malcolm Gladwell on “CBS Sunday Morning” on September 29!
“The Revenge of the Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell
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In the 1970s, zookeepers around the world began investing increasing resources into breeding their animal populations in captivity. The logic was clear. Why go to all the trouble of capturing animals in the wild? The growing conservation movement also favored breeding programs. The new strategy was a great success – with one major outlier: the cheetah.
“They rarely had offspring that survived, and many of them were unable to reproduce,” recalls geneticist Stephen O’Brien, then working at the National Cancer Institute.
There was no point. The cheetah seemed like a perfect example of evolutionary fitness: a huge nuclear reactor for a heart, the legs of a greyhound, a skull shaped like a professional cyclist’s aerodynamic helmet, and semi-retractable claws that, as O’Brien puts it, ‘grab’. the earth like football boots as they run after their prey at sixty miles an hour.”
“It’s the fastest animal in the world,” O’Brien said. “The second fastest animal in the world is the American pronghorn. And the reason it’s the second fastest animal is because it was running from the cheetahs.”
The zookeepers wondered if they were doing something wrong, or if there was something about the cheetah’s makeup that they didn’t understand. They came up with theories and tried experiments – all to no avail. Ultimately, they shrugged and said the animals must be “skittish.”
Matters came to a head at a 1980 meeting in Front Royal, Virginia. Zoo directors from all over the world attended, including the head of a major conservation program in South Africa.
“And he says, ‘Do you have someone who knows what he’s doing scientifically?’ O’Brien recalls.[To] basically explain to us why our cheetah breeding program in South Africa has about a 15 percent success rate, while the rest of these animals – elephants, horses and giraffes – reproduce like rats?’ “
Two scientists raised their hands, both colleagues of O’Brien. They flew to South Africa, to a large nature reserve near Pretoria. They took blood and semen samples from dozens of cheetahs. What they discovered surprised them. The cheetahs’ sperm count was low. And the spermatozoa themselves were severely deformed. That was clearly why the animals had so many problems with reproduction. It wasn’t that they were ‘skittish’.
But why? O’Brien’s laboratory then began testing the blood samples sent to them. They had done similar studies in the past in birds, humans, horses and domestic cats, and in all those cases the animals showed a healthy degree of genetic diversity: in most species, about 30 percent of the genes sampled will show some degree of variation . . The cheetah’s genes were nothing like that. They were all the same. “I’ve never seen a species that was so genetically uniform,” O’Brien said.
O’Brien’s findings were greeted with skepticism by his colleagues. So he and his team pressed on.
“I went to Children’s Hospital in Washington and learned how to do skin grafts in a burn unit,” he said. “They taught me how to keep it sterile and how to take the…cuts and how to suture it and all that. And then we did. [skin grafts on] about eight cheetahs in South Africa, and then we did another six or eight in Oregon.”
Winston, Oregon, was home to the Wildlife Safari, which at the time was the largest collection of cheetahs in the United States.
The idea was simple. If you transplant a piece of skin from one animal to another, the recipient’s body will reject it. It recognizes the donor’s genes as foreign. “It would turn black and die within two weeks,” O’Brien said. But if you take a piece of skin from, for example, identical twins and have it transplanted onto another, it works. The donor’s immune system thinks the skin is his own. This was the ultimate test of his hypothesis.
The grafts were small – 2.5 by 2.5 cm, sewn to the side of the animal’s chest and protected by an elastic bandage wrapped around the cat’s body. First, the team gave some cheetahs a skin graft from a domestic cat to ensure that the animals had an immune system. Sure enough, the cheetahs rejected the cat graft: it became inflamed and then necrotic. Their bodies knew what was different – and a domestic cat was different. The team then transplanted skin from other cheetahs. What happened? Nothing! They were accepted, O’Brien said, “as if they were identical twins.” The only place you see this is in inbred mice that have been brother-sister for twenty generations. And that convinced me.’
O’Brien realized that the world’s cheetah population must have been devastated at some point. His best guess was that this happened during the extinction of large mammals 12,000 years ago – when sabre-toothed cats, mastodons, mammoths, giant ground sloths and more than thirty other species were wiped out by an ice age. Somehow the cheetah survived. But barely.
“The numbers that fit all the data are less than a hundred, maybe less than fifty,” O’Brien said. It is even possible that the cheetah population has been reduced to a single pregnant female. And the only way those lonely pairs of cheetahs could survive was to overcome the inhibition that most mammals have against incest: sisters had to mate with brothers, cousins with cousins. The species eventually recovered, but only through the endless replication of the same limited set of genes. The cheetah was still beautiful. But now each cheetah represented exactly the same kind of splendor.
From ‘Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering’ by Malcolm Gladwell. Copyright © 2024 by Malcolm Gladwell. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group. All rights reserved.
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“The Revenge of the Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell
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“Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering” by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown and Co.), in hardcover, eBook, and audio formats, available October 1 gladwellbooks.com “Revisionist History” podcast
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