Supernormal Stimuli
http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/57144/
The author of a new book on behavioral evolution explains how primal urges overrun their original purpose.
Put a mirror on the side of a beta fighting fish’s aquarium and the gaudy iridescent male will beat himself against the glass, attacking a perceived intruder. A hen lays eggs day after day as a farmer removes them for human breakfasts — 3,000 in a lifetime without one chick hatching, but she never gives up trying. The healthiest, largest male chickadees have the highest crests on their heads and they are sought after as mates. When researchers outfit runt males with little pointed caps, much like the human dunce cap, females line up to mate with them, forsaking the naturally fitter, hatless males.
(TheScientist.com.February 19, 2010)
Misinterpreting a retraction of rising sea level predictions
at 9:00 am on Wednesday, 24 February 2010
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Misinterpreting-retraction-of-rising-sea-level-predictions.html
A new skeptic argument has emerged that upon close inspection, is a polar opposite to the scientific reality. This week, scientists who published a 2009 paper on sea level rise retracted their prediction due to errors in their methodology. This has led some to claim sea levels are no longer predicted to rise. This interpretation was helped no doubt by the unfortunate Guardian headline “Climate scientists withdraw journal claims of rising sea levels“. However, when you read the article and peruse the peer-reviewed science on future sea level, you learn that the opposite is the case. . . .
(Skeptical Science, February 25, 2010)
Misunderstanding Darwin Natural selection’s secular critics get it wrong
http://bostonreview.net/BR35.2/block_kitcher.php
What Darwin Got Wrong
Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26 (cloth)
Ned Block and Philip Kitcher
What Darwin Got Wrong
Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26 (cloth)
Ned Block and Philip Kitcher
In On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, Charles Darwin made two remarkable scientific contributions. First, he presented an overwhelming case for the relatedness of all living things. Biological diversity, he argued, results from a process of “transmutation” of species—via “descent with modification.” Second, he recognized that the basic mechanism of such change is natural selection: a combination of variations in traits and a selective retention of the variations that contribute to reproductive success.
Descent with modification was accepted quickly. As early as 1872, Thomas Henry Huxley described Darwin as having achieved a revolution comparable to that brought about by Newton’s Principia. Natural selection, by contrast, remained controversial until the 1930s, when Darwin’s ideas were integrated with the genetics of Gregor Mendel and Thomas Hunt Morgan, creating the “Modern Synthesis.” More than 70 years later, thanks to a proliferation of evolutionary explanations and significant new theoretical contributions, the fundamentals of evolutionary biology are reasonably well settled.
(Boston Review, March/April 2010)
Forecast: Warm With a Chance of Denial
at 8:27 am on Tuesday, 23 February 2010
Do weathermen themselves “know which way the wind blows”?
A recent national survey of TV weather forecasters, all of them meteorologists, reveals that nearly 1 in 3 believes “global warming is a scam,” 1 in 4 is not sure, and three out of four are not convinced that the warming of the Earth since 1950 is man-made.
(MIller-McCune, February 23, 2010)
Shuffling genes without sex
at 12:46 pm on Monday, 22 February 2010
http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/57153/
Researchers have discovered one way that asexually reproducing organisms maintain variation in their DNA. Female whiptail lizards can actually double their own chromosomes during meiosis, according to a study published online today inNature.
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A checkered whiptail lizard Image: Peter Baumann |
“It’s a great piece of work,” saidCharles Cole,a herpetologist with the American Museum of Natural History in New York who was not involved in the study. “This study shows us that evolution came up with some really fancy gymnastics here that fifty years ago we never would have guessed these lizards could be doing.”
(The Scientist.com, February 22, 2010)
Climate changes ‘behind shifts in wetland birds’
at 9:12 am on Monday, 22 February 2010
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8523031.stm
Climate changes are behind a dramatic shift in the numbers of wetland birds visiting the UK, a study suggests.
The numbers of birds, including ring plovers and pochards, wintering in the UK have fallen by around a half in the past decade, according to the RSPB.
(BBC News, February 22, 2010)
Have American Thinker disproven global warming?
at 8:58 am on Monday, 22 February 2010
http://www.skepticalscience.com/American-Thinker-claims-to-have-disproven-global-warming.html
American Thinker have published an article The AGW Smoking Gun by Gary Thompson who claims to disprove a key component of anthropogenic global warming. The article begins by stating “…it seems that the only way to disprove the AGW hypothesis is to address problems with the science“. This is a fair statement and a return to an emphasis on science in the climate debate is most welcome. So have American Thinker discovered a flaw in climate science that has escaped the attention of the world’s climate scientists? Let’s examine Thompson’s article to find out.
(Skeptical Science, February 22, 2010)
IPCC Errors: Fact and Spin
at 2:41 pm on Friday, 19 February 2010
Currently, a few errors — and supposed errors — in the last IPCC report (AR4) are making the media rounds, together with a lot of distortion and professional spin by parties interested in discrediting climate science.
Time for us to sort the wheat from the chaff: Which of these putative errors are real, and which are not? And what does it all mean, for the IPCC in particular, and for climate science more broadly?
(Solve Climate, February 18, 2010)
What would happen if the sun fell to Maunder Minimum levels?
at 10:05 am on Friday, 19 February 2010
http://www.skepticalscience.com/What-would-happen-if-the-sun-fell-to-Maunder-Minimum-levels.html
The sun’s output is not static – it varies over a 11 year cycle and also shows long term changes. Currently, the sun is beginning to come out of a prolonged and deep solar minimum. This has led some to speculate that the sun might be entering a period of low solar activity similar to the Maunder Minimum in the late 17th century. At that time, the planet experienced markedly lower temperatures, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere. How would the Earth’s climate respond if the sun did enter another Maunder Minimum? This answer is explored in a new paper On the Effect of a New Grand Minimum of Solar Activity on the Future Climate on Earth (Feulner & Rahmstorf 2010).
(Skeptical Science, February 19, 2010)
Ruse and Midgley on Fodor and Piattelli-Palmerini on natural selection
Jerry Coyne comments on reviews of What Darwin Got Wrong.
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/ruse-on-fodor-and-piattelli-palmerini/
What Darwin Got Wrong, the new book by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (not to be confused with Massimo Pigliucci), came out two days ago. Its thesis is that while evolution may be true, natural selection plays at best a minor role in evolutionary transformation. Selection, say F&P-P, can be rejected on two grounds: it is empirically untenable and philosophically unsupportable.
(Why Evolution is True, February 19, 20100
Experts Try to Clear Confusion about Extreme Weather and Climate Change
at 2:51 pm on Wednesday, 17 February 2010
Some Say Blizzards Consistent With a Warming Planet
Some proponents of climate science are on a public relations drive to restore public confidence in the consensus that Earth is heating up, after critics seized on blizzards in the American Northeast, claiming they were evidence of global cooling.
Speaking to reporters, Jeff Masters, a meteorologist and founder of the Weather Underground web site, said that one extreme weather event, like a record-breaking snowfall, does not change the reality of climate change.
(Solve Climate, February 16, 2010)
Three Versions of the Moribund Ants
at 11:28 am on Tuesday, 16 February 2010
I have posted three versions of the same story from Current Biology, February 9, 2010. The most recent posting, the original scientific article, is called Moribund Ants Leave Their Nests to Die in Social Isolation, the second posting is from Ed Yong in Not Rocket Science, January 28, 2010, titled Terminally ill ants choose to die alone, and the third is Heroic altruistic ants face death alone to save colony, by Matt Walker, Earth News Editor in BBC Earth News, February 15, 2010). I intend to compare these three articles because they will illustrate a lot of what can be good and what is often bad in science writing.
Lets start with the subjects of the titles: we have moribund ants, terminally ill ants, and heroic altruistic ants. Everyone notice the progression here? The subject is ants. Each subject is modified by an adjective. Moribund is a Latin-based, technical term meaning ”at the point of death” “or “in terminal decline”. The science writer, Ed Yong, translates “moribund”, literally, into English with “terminally ill”. This is a non-technical expression that most readers know the meaning of very well, thus lowering the sense of technicality. Matt Walker jumps the track completely, attributing heroic virtues and altruistic motives for leaving the nest.
Moribund Ants Leave Their Nests to Die in Social Isolation
at 10:56 am on Tuesday, 16 February 2010
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(09)02155-1
Highlights
- Ants actively leave their nests before death and break up all social contact
- Social withdrawal is not due to manipulation through pathogens or parasites
- Instead, it appears to be an altruistic act of the ants themselves
Summary
- Animal societies provide perfect conditions for the spread of infections and are therefore expected to employ mechanisms that reduce the probability of transmitting pathogens to group members [1,2,3,4]. Death in nature rarely results from old age but commonly results from diseases. Leaving one’s group to die in seclusion might be an efficient way of minimizing the risk of infecting kin. Anecdotal observations of moribund individuals deserting from their groups exist for several species, including humans (e.g., [5]), but have rarely been substantiated by quantitative analysis. . .
- (Current Biology, February 9, 20100
Heroic altruistic ants face death alone to save colony
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8516000/8516017.stm
Ants live altruistically, but some die altruistically too.
When ants of the species Temnothorax unifasciatus get sick, they abandon their nest, walking far away from their relatives to die alone.
They perform this act of heroism to prevent the illness that is killing them from spreading to the colony.
The discovery, published in Current Biology, is the first time that such behaviour has been shown in ants or any other social insect.
(BBC : Earth News, February 15, 2010)
Climate scientist says Himalayan glacier report is ‘robust and rigorous’
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/14/climate-scientist-himalayan-glacier-report
The scientist at the centre of the storm over mistakes by the UN’s climate change panel has broken his silence on the affair to defend his report as “robust and rigorous”.
Martin Parry, a climate expert at the Grantham Institute and Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College, London, said he was “perplexed” at the way the media has focused on what . . .
(The Guadian, February 14, 2010)
Oceans’ acidity rate is soaring, claims study
at 12:21 pm on Monday, 15 February 2010
The rate at which the oceans are becoming more acidic is greater today than at any time in tens of millions of years, according to a new study.
Rapidly rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere mean that the rate of ocean acidification is the fastest since the age of the dinosaurs, which became extinct 65m years ago, scientists believe.
(The Independdent;Nature, February 15, 2010)
Greenland’s glaciers disappearing from the bottom up
at 12:12 pm on Monday, 15 February 2010
Water warmed by climate change is taking giant bites out of the underbellies of Greenland’s glaciers. As much as 75 per cent of the ice lost by the glaciers is melted by ocean warmth.
“There’s an entrenched view in the public community that glaciers only lose ice when icebergs calve off,” says Eric Rignot at the University of California, Irvine. “Our study shows that what’s happening beneath the water is just as important.”
(New Scientist, February 14, 2010)
The Dunning-Kruger effect and the climate debate
at 9:49 am on Monday, 15 February 2010
http://www.skepticalscience.com/The-Dunning-Kruger-effect-and-the-climate-debate.html
One of the best titles for a scientific paper has to be the Ig Nobel prize winning “Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments“. The paper compares people’s skill levels to their own assessment of their abilities. In hindsight, the result seems self-evident. Unskilled people lack the skill to rate their own level of competence. This leads to the unfortunate result that unskilled people rate themselves higher than more competent people. The phenonemon is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, named after the paper’s authors, and is often seen in the climate debate. There are many with a cursory understanding who believe they’re discovered fundamental flaws in climate science that have somehow been overlooked or ignored by climate scientists. Some take this a step further and believe they’re being deceived.
(Skeptical Science, February 15, 2010)
Final Word on Himalayan Glaciers
I have published a three-part paper on the Himalayan glaciers. It is written by Kenneth Hewitt, professor emeritus in geography and environmental studies and research associate at the Cold Regions Research Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada. He has spent a considerable part of his professional life studying Himalayan glaciers. If you have doubts about the glacier controversy or worry about the intelligence, integrity, or credibility of the climate scientists these articles may be reassuring to you.
Understanding Glacier Changes: Risks Posed by Glacial Lakes, Debris Flows: Part 3 of 3
at 1:35 pm on Sunday, 14 February 2010
Part 3 of a 3-part series
Glaciers and their immediate environs present many dangers for humans, such as crevasses and glacier mills into which one might fall, heavily crevassed ice falls, snow and ice avalanches from the side walls and, along the flanks, dumping of great boulders, ponding and floods from melt water. For these reasons, there are hardly ever permanent settlements on or right beside the ice. These are hazards mainly to mountaineers, hunters, travelers and military expeditions.
(Solve Climate, February 12.2010)
Scientists Respond to IPCC Backlash
at 12:32 pm on Sunday, 14 February 2010
Fifty-five scientists from the Netherlands released the following open letter about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and errors discovered in its 2007 report on climate change.
In the letter, they explain how the IPCC works, and how the errors drawing so much attention “do not alter the key finding that human beings are very likely changing the climate, with far reaching impacts in the long run.”
(Solve Climate, February 11, 2010)
Australia, Antarctica Linked by Climate
at 11:54 am on Sunday, 14 February 2010
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2010/208/1?etoc
Researchers have found an intriguing climate link between the southwestern corner of Australia and a region of eastern Antarctica. When the former suffers a drought, the latter is often battered with heavy snowfalls. More provocative: Several climate models suggest that human activity could be strengthening the connection.
(ScienceNOW, February 10, 2010)
Morality and religion: are they genetic adaptations?
In a new paper, “The origins of religion: evolved adaptation or byproduct?”, Ilkka Pyysiäinen from the University of Helsinki and Marc Hauser from Harvard discuss the evolution of religion and morality (The paper was highlighted by Philip Ball in Nature News and by P.Z. at Pharyngula.) The paper is divided roughly into two parts: . . .
(Why Evolution Is True, February 14, 2010)
Understanding Glacier Changes: Elevation Matters; Part 2 of 3
at 2:42 pm on Saturday, 13 February 2010
http://solveclimate.com/blog/20100209/understanding-glacier-changes-elevation-matters
Part 2 of 3-part series
As we saw in part one, climate change is obviously having different consequences in different mountain areas of Asia. The situation in the Karakoram must represent some distinctive conditions.
Three features of the regional environment seem critical. The first two relate to snowfall and the nourishment of these glaciers. They are intermediate in type between the summer accumulation (snowfall) glaciers of the greater Himalayas, and the winter accumulation glaciers of, say, the Caucasus and European Alps to the west. In each of the latter, more or less strong glacier retreat is reported.
(Solve Climate, February 9, 2010)
Glacier Responses to Climate Change are Complex, as are the Impacts: Part 1 of 3
at 11:39 am on Saturday, 13 February 2010
http://solveclimate.com/blog/20100207/glacier-responses-climate-change-are-complex-are-impacts
Part 1 of a three-part series on glaciers
Glaciers are quite sensitive to climate change and, recently, there have been many reports of major changes in the Himalaya and other parts of High Asia; mostly of glaciers retreating fast. Impacts of a range of glacier hazards, and on the reliability of water resources, are of concern at local, national and transnational scales.
However, there is also a growing recognition that glacial conditions in the region are very diverse, and so are their responses to climate change.
For Part 2 of this 3-part series go to:
http://solveclimate.com/blog/20100209/understanding-glacier-changes-elevation-matters
(Solve Climate, February 7, 2010)