Kansas turns away from progress

Appar­ent­ly, we’ll be fight­ing over evo­lu­tion again. The Kansas state school board will be split 6–4, with a con­ser­v­a­tive major­i­ty, rather than tied 5–5.

Oy. 

(Via The Pan­da’s Thumb.)

Global warming killing sea birds?

Sci­en­tists in Orkney and Shet­land think thou­sands of seabirds failed to breed because glob­al warm­ing killed their food. Because of glob­al cli­mate change, plank­ton migrate before small fish grow up. With­out the fish, sandeel, the birds can’t raise their young. This is one of the things peo­ple have spec­u­lat­ed about but not proven. If inter­act­ing species react dif­fer­ent­ly to rapid cli­mate change, no one is sure what the effects on ecosys­tems would be. Ecol­o­gists have argued about how depen­dent ecosys­tems and com­mu­ni­ties are on the links between species, and this usu­al­ly looks like an abstruse the­o­ret­i­cal debate. The col­lapse of fish stocks and breed­ing bird pop­u­la­tions could be results of slight shifts in the tim­ing of plank­ton migrations.

Does that prove that com­mu­ni­ties are Glea­son­ian or Clementsian? Does it mat­ter? Clements thought com­mu­ni­ties devel­oped in stereo­typed ways, form­ing a “super­or­gan­ism.” Glea­son thought ani­mals and plants wound up in the same place and became a com­mu­ni­ty, and that was all a com­mu­ni­ty was. Gal­lons of ink have been spilled to prove that com­mu­ni­ties are not super-organ­isms. None-the-less, com­mu­ni­ties exhib­it struc­ture in some form. Fre­quent­ly, the removal of one species induces lit­tle harm, but some­times it is catastrophic.

Peo­ple define key­stone species as any species that has that sort of wide rang­ing impact on a com­mu­ni­ty, but that def­i­n­i­tion is a bit coarse. A beaver is a key­stone species because it changes the envi­ron­ment. Krill are food for every­thing. Every­thing depends on plank­ton, but every­thing in the prairie depends on grass. Bison are a key­stone species, but not grass. I don’t know whether Scot­tish seabirds will go extinct because plank­ton migrate faster. Per­haps next year they’ll rebound and every­one will feel silly.

I sus­pect that if they sur­vive, they’ll do it by a com­bi­na­tion of learn­ing and evo­lu­tion. The ones that migrate ear­li­er will sur­vive bet­ter. The ones that eat a wider range of fish will sur­vive, oth­ers with broad­en their diet. Or the plank­ton will be back to nor­mal next year.  I sus­pect that the human race will sur­vive cli­mate change by sim­i­lar means. But is it worth the hassle?

Glob­al cli­mate change won’t have instan­ta­neous, dras­tic effects. It’ll be the death by a mil­lion paper cuts. The prob­lem is that ban­dages will get to be in short sup­ply by the time any­one notices a problem. 

Untitled

Haloscan com­ment­ing and track­back have been added to this blog.

Abu Ghraib

Talk­Left rounds up new evi­dence of rape and sodomy.

I’ll just add that Sy Hersh has been say­ing this for a while, and claims to have seen video. He claims sol­diers tape them­selves rap­ing chil­dren so they can use the tapes to tor­ture moth­ers. The moth­ers smug­gle requests to their fam­i­lies that they be killed to end their mis­ery. That’s why dai­ly mor­tar attacks focus on the wom­en’s wing.

Dis­gust­ing. And all evi­dence points up the chain of command.

Good politicians

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