Ever wonder why you get colder when the wind blows? We walk around every day inside a media bubble eagerly prattling on about the “wind-chill” factor. That certainly seems a bona fide blessing when it comes to the question of whether to charge out of the house wearing a sweater, coat, tee-shirt or nothing at all (well – that has other implications), but knowing that the temperature is 50 degrees while the wind-chill makes it feel like 40 still begs the question: why?
I started pondering this (not very systematically, to be sure) several years ago once I started realizing that a plane plowing through the atmosphere has to worry (or its engineers and pilots do) about creating too much warmth on the wings and skin of the airplane. And noticing that the friction of the wind helped melt snow. In other words, wind heats up both the plane and the snow, while it cools you down? What gives?
The answer came from a totally unexpected source. In a recent issue of the New York Review of Books (May 27) Richard Lewontin, Research Professor at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, examined a book called What Darwin Got Wrong, by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini. Don’t be alarmed; it’s not a “creationist” document but an attempt by a philosopher and a student of linguistics and cognitive science to address what they see as flaws (in logic and language) of some terminology commonly used in biology and natural history. As well as the subsequent replication of those flawed constructs in other disciplines. (Although, given the somewhat frenzied state of the debate about Darwinism in this country, I don’t exonerate those two gentlemen for choosing what strikes me as an evolutionist-baiting and somewhat misleading title.)
But that’s neither here nor there, for present purposes. I promised you a word about the wind. Patience! Here it comes!
An interesting feature of Lewontin’s review is his discussion of “ecological niches.” It’s almost a scientific cliche, of course, to say that every organism eats, dwells, and reproduces within a particular “ecological niche,” which is key to its survival. Less attention is paid, however, to how each organism alters that niche by its presence. But, as Lewontin points out, every life form (including humans and trees) carries around its own “atmospheric niche!” We are all (including the pines and the cedars) surrounded by a layer of warm, moist air which we create by our very existence as sentient beings. Now. What happens – here goes the wind-chill factor! – is that this cocoon of bio-engendered warmth gets dispersed when we walk in the wind, and thus we feel the cold more sharply! Our bubble is burst! Our insulation is in shreds! Our natural, biological North Face jacket has been atomized! In Lewontin’s words, “The wind is not colder than the still air, but it blows away the metabolically produced layer around our bodies, exposing us to the real world out there.”
So there you are! Now, don’t get me wrong. However deeply committed I am to being exposed to the real world (oh, I am! I am!), that doesn’t mean I will refuse a sweater the next time it seems wind-chilly.