Thomas J. Webb’s Ecology Blog

(If you know all the arguments about why biodiversity is awesome, or think you do, go ahead and skip down to Cultural Diversity)

Biodiversity

This is an ecology blog! Or at least that’s what the title claims. So, we’re going to talk a little bit about biodiversity. We all know that over the course of life on this planet, there have been many mass extinctions and life rebounded each time. Not only that, life rebounded more quickly. The universe didn’t change its hostile, no, indifferent stance towards us. It is life itself that grew stronger.

After a catastrophe, there will always be at least a few species that miraculously thrive in the new environment, turning a greater tragedy into personal gain. You know, like those assholes who short-sell stock during recessions (a shady practice that only became legal again last year) or Apu in the Simpsons Movie (”please, please, can’t you all just be happy for me?”)

With more diversity of species, more such species will exist. Biodiversity protects biodiversity. Biodiversity means possibilities, and this vast pool of possibilities gave birth to our own species! So, we should respect this vast pool and realize it holds even more potential than we could even imagine. Maybe a rogue earthling bacterium transported by an asteroid is already colonizing another planet right now, slowly fermenting a possible sequel to man.

Too spiritual for you? Too ecocentric? Okay, let’s look at a more pragmatic argument that is just as strong to make sure you’re on the same page as me (even though this doesn’t pertain directly to this post’s point). Let’s start with medicine/biotechnology.

The human body is a vast, complex thing. We understand it more and more all the time, yet some things still allude us. We would like to believe we could build a human body from scratch and therefore reengineer it to fix any problem. The fact is, we still are to biology what a teenage hacker is to code. He knows not how to write a working program, but he can splice code with mixed success and even edit code. One time, he fixed a bug in a perl script, but doesn’t remember how he did it. So we are with our own bodies. We could not, for example, engineer regenerating tissue from scratch, but seeing that sharks have this ability, we just might be able to copy what we see. In fact, many technologies are copied directly from nature.

I just mentioned sharks, right? Here’s one good example of this. A few years back, noting that shark skin seems engineered to repel parasites of all sorts, the guy who discovered this looked at the molecular structure of the skin and made synthetic shark skin to use on navy ships. I just about guarantee that we would not have created such unless we discovered it.

I’ll end the pragmatic side of this argument by pointing out that our species (just like any other) relies heavily on a healthy ecosystem of ecological services, like filtering pollutants and recycling waste. Biodiversity decreases disruption in ecosystems from external factors. For example, if an area becomes warmer due to shifting currents or whatever, trees won’t disappear from the forest but instead a different tree will dominate. The soil will remain fertile, the area will remain not too hot, etc.

Even if you don’t buy all my arguments above, as long as you believe that biodiversity, i.e., the diversity of life, is good for life as a whole, we are good to go… (you needn’t accept that life as a whole is inherently valuable to accept that humanity as a whole is!)

Cultural Diversity

Now, you can basically replace “biodiversity” with “cultural diversity” and “life as a whole” with “humanity” above and you will still be making good sense. There are a variety of ways any cultural dimension can be, and the society or culture in question still function well and the people be happy. Given biological constants, there are amazing variations in thought patterns, taboos, norms, folkways, etc. Most cultures have their own strong points and weak points with regard to human happiness. So what could the advantage of diversity be? Many!!

We can see from histories of ideas that certain kinds of ideas came from certain kinds of cultures. If we had all the same people, but all thinking more similarly, then some ideas are less likely to have arisen or will have much more slowly, since different cultures are focused on different things. Zen Buddhist techniques of teaching intuition will some day revolutionize the West (computer science is just the start), while human rights are enjoyed in nations such as Japan where it is unlikely for such concepts to have arisen (since these peoples don’t buy into erroneous notions of the self we enjoy in the West, such as that of free will). The wonderful thing about ideas is they can be shared! So, when we talk about diversity, the best biological analog is to that of bacteria, where genes can jump from one species to another in a way that it doesn’t with more complex life forms. So, diversity of cultures means a vast marketplace of ideas with which to better society.

We also must be honest with ourselves and recognize that all cultures have advantages and disadvantages. Sometimes, a culture has a fatal flaw in it (and it may even be our culture that has such a flaw in it) that may lead to its own destruction, need for a painful transition or otherwise to great unhappiness for its people. If a culture copies itself, rudely edging out others like cancerous cells, then it may spread said flaw, causing vast unnecessary happiness. Whoever you are, please don’t delude yourself into thinking your culture must be better in every way. After all, you have an intimate knowledge of your own culture and at best a thorough knowledge of others (”at best” meaning if you’ve spent 30+ years in another country).

So, we must preserve cultures’ ability to copy good from other cultures if necessary and also to preserve (and even create!) diversity. This means that cultural imperialism or cultural genocide are no-nos.

The one negative of diversity that cannot be overcome is that no two peoples will always have the same understanding of a situation or even of what reality is. This is why the idea of getting two people to agree fixing a war doesn’t work (miraculous failure of Israeli-Palestinian dialogs demonstrate this, though there may be other ways to end the struggle without both sides agreeing…). Of course, attempts to fix this problem have caused just as many violent clashes as the problem itself. Meaning, even if we really tried to kill cultural diversity, we couldn’t destroy it completely. Look at the religious conflicts through the history of Europe that created no consensus (paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson). So, it’s better to let this thing flourish and be healthy and enjoy its fruits while being mindful of its thorns.

Against Missionaries, be their religion Christianity or Capitalism (or Communism)

Now, I mentioned yesterday my opposition to missionaries. Heh, no secret. I think in an early blog post, I jokingly suggested retaliation by cannibalism to such an offense. Absolute belief that your own culture is correct while others are sadly mistaken is not only bigoted, it’s highly illogical. As proselytizing reduces cultural diversity, I’m of course opposed to it. If everyone were religiously similar, their cultures would be since religion and culture are inseparable. To think otherwise is to not understand how very different modes of thinking can be. It’s important also to be humble and recognize that you may be wrong. Your own culture might be preparing to disappear up its own asshole.

So, you clever people might say to me, “well, you aren’t a Christian, so of course you are going to be against Christian missionaries!” Well, I am at least 90% certain that even if I were a Christian, I’d still be against Christian missionaries. How do I know? Because of my opposition to the violent proselytism on the part of a cult I do belong to - “freedom and democracy”. You see, our nation believes that attacking countries that don’t have basically our political system and installing said will result in world prosperity. It worked for Japan right? Well, ever since adding democracy, freedoms have decreased in Iraq, with the installation of Sharia law. When we hung Saddam, “the international community” (which means all the powerful nations) thought “justice” while Iraqis thought “revenge”. Even if it is beneficial for these people to “become free” (based on our culture’s limited definition), the fact is we failed to help them achieve that goal and we must respect their culture’s right to evolve on their own, at their own pace towards their own valid version of a happy society.
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Discovery News : Discovery Channel : Great Apes Prefer Food Well-Done

This study potentially pushes back our earliest we started eating cooked food to just after we first began to control fire. The reasoning is that since our ape relatives appear to prefer the taste of many things cooked over raw (they tried different fruits, vegetables and meats, these are chimps, who are omnivorous), we didn’t have to evolutionarily acquire a taste for it over time. A tendency would have already existed, since cooking makes many foods softer and sweeter, both things meaning more calorie efficient.

I’m a big fan of technology, and as a strict vegetarian myself, I believe I owe much to two technologies developed during prehistoric times - grain and cooking. What technologies will humanity come up with to feed ourselves for the next million years? I hope to be part of the answer to that question.

Spring Haiku

The air smells of pine
The grey squirrels are fucking
It shall rain again

春の俳句

松匂い
リスがやってる
雨ふりそう

(okay, I just wanted to post this picture of two squirrels going at it I took… look!)

Start with Categories, end with Nuanced Vision

General Description:

In a vacuum of knowledge about the underlying causes of phenomena one sees, the first thing one can do to understand the phenomenon is to categorize the phenomena themselves. When a scientist groups phenomenon into categories, he may be leading himself astray - the categories may or may not have anything to do with the underlying causes. Nonetheless, the sharper and more precise the categories, the closer they may become to reflecting causes.

When these categories are in error, they are discarded outright when a sharper view of the science emerges. When these categories have merit, they still tend to take the sideline when they lose their importance. In either case, they mysteriously still get taught in elementary school.

Example:

Taxonomy (categorization of the phenomenon of biodiversity) vs. phylogeny (the evolutionary origins of biodiversity). Biologists in near pre-evolutionary times were already quite good at categorizing species based on their physiology. By the time Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species was published, they have long since discarded classification systems such as flying, land, sea or useful, dangerous, harmless or other such nonsense in favor of Linnaean Taxonomy, which reflected the best of their knowledge of the day.

Some of Linnaeus’ categories did represent true evolutionary relationships. This is because he was so careful to categorize based on morphological similarities. Some things were, of course, wrong, too. Cases of convergent evolution naturally created false positives for category matches. Paleontology did much to correct the taxonomy since Linnaeus’ time, and molecular data, more still. Now, the system itself still suffers from not correctly reflecting the underlying causes of biodiversity - there are still many paraphyletic clades (unless you want to deem birds reptiles, for example). And, the classifications highlight the sections of biodiversity we were most familiar with before the invention of the microscope, and that is but a tiny representation of one of the major clades!

So, even though Linnaean taxonomy is at the verge of being discarded outright for strict cladistics, the taxonomy itself proved quite useful in telling us where to look. Why do mammals all have such similar limbs? Such similar embryology? These questions lead to the biology we have today, and a frustrated purist who would reject early attempts at classification as simply imposing a librarian’s order on a chaotic universe would have done nothing to help a fledgling science. Oh, and the “kingdoms” are quite easy for school children to grasp.

Some More Examples:

• Schizophrenias are still numerous (you may recognize some - paranoid, disorganized, delusional, hey, that sounds like half of my friends! just kidding, friends!), and there’s no agreement what the types are, if there really are types, or if the different types even represent the same disease. Surely the most difficult thing for the human mind to grasp is the human mind.
• Speaking of phylogeny and genes, a good start for understanding physical anthropology was races. When the categorization was based on skull shape, not other things like skin color, it was closest to representing human history, since skull characteristics are among the least affected by natural selection. Some of the categorizations back in the 1800s were close to right, but molecular data has relegated “race” to a very minor role, if any, in describing populations.
• Quantum theory describes a good number of quantum particles. We only know how these particles act. It very well could be that none of these exist as distinct types of particles, as some attempts at quantum field theory might suggest.

Application:

An ambitious scientist would be half-right be be suspicious of a young science’s obsession with categorization. But he should be cautiously optimistic about more and more detailed classification (read: observation) while striving for something that points to a fundamental cause. Oh, but scientists already know about all this. What can you, the non-scientist glean from this? One day, you are telling your friend over a drink “there are X types of people in this world…” and proceeding to bitch about your X, and the next, you develop a Mark Twain-esque understanding of human nature.

Be satisfied with solid observation at first, and even indulge yourself with your atavistic desire to categorize if you must. But from there, learn the underlying causes, the essential nature of things, the ways in which the categories are an illusion, or at least but a small puzzle piece.

Here are some of the more obvious things that could help combat global environmental crises like global warming in a way that doesn’t crush individual economic liberties or doesn’t increase state control of the economy. This is all leading up to something. You’ll notice that for many of these, it’s simply a case of the cost of something not reflecting the environmental cost, due to marketing controls.

Of course, the ones of these that are both obvious and easy do get implemented - slowly. Green Scissors has their influence, but that only gets the really low-hanging fruits. I’d like to see leadership in the executive branch have the gonads to implement the obvious, but politically suicidal (particularly #2!).

I’m naturally more interested in the not-so-low-hanging fruits, but that’s the subject of past (and future!) blog posts.

1. End farm subsidies. They are the reason alfalfa is grown in the desert and meat is cheap. They only help the richest farmers, anyway.
2. Stop making gas cheap. End subsidies for gas, oil. The government fights the creeping “problem” of gas being expensive. There are many, many creative folks working on alternatives to hydrocarbons, yet here we are artificially reducing the demand for their work.
3. Make national parks, state recreation areas, etc. pay for themselves. Wild nature is a scarce resource. Charge for it. There is an opportunity cost in keeping these lands, and it costs money to clean up after the homo sapiens. For this matter, private corporations can do the same thing! It is unlikely a nature-enjoyment use of a land will win out against more exploitative uses in the free market often enough to preserve biodiversity, but stranger things happen (like churches being rich!) and rigging the game slightly in favor of such entities would be much less statist than so many other proposed measures…
4. Big business, trade unions are forces to be reckoned with. Though they may temporarily work to protect the environment, they are more often foes. The government needn’t (and shouldn’t) oppress these entities, but it can stop giving them unchecked political power that isn’t afforded any individual human. If asked to donate to a club the whales fund, I think you’re answer would be “pshaw!”, yet that corporation you own stock in, or that union you’re in, may lobby time and again against your wishes - without asking you once! Businesses and trade unions’ lobbying limbs exist to maintain status quo - but status quo is precisely the cause of our troubles, no?
5. Lower taxes. More money to donate to the Nature Conservancy. When people pay less in taxes, they donate to charitable causes, and some are bound to be environmental. Land-grabbing orgs large and small do much more using less, than the federal government.
6. Let the private sector feed the poor. Poorige is good for you and lower on the food chain. And, it’s cheaper (unless the government artificially makes foods higher in the food chain cheaper, which they do). Food stamps give you the power to buy the laziest foods, which also require the most industrial processing. Poor people have time on their hands, not money. Let them have potatoes, not potato chips. Oh, yes, and population growth is a doozy and when you must choose between feeding yourself or having a child who will stave, just maybe you might choose the former.
7. Enforce property rights. An industry doesn’t have any special rights to pollute my property.
8. and much more…

This morning, the dishwasher pissed me off. For the quadrillionth time, a spoon’s handle fell through one of the .5cm² squares put in the silverware basket so water (and dirt) could move freely about. Generally, dirt is smaller and dishes are larger, but the mesh couldn’t eliminate the possibility of utensil handles falling through without also trapping larger chunks, “cleaning” utensils in a sort of sanitized crap-pool.

The mind thinks in categories, or discreet entities. The world exists as no such thing, and we make technology to sort out the difference - to find a physical existence of our social categories. We don’t want the unclean on our silverware. Unclean is generally small pieces. We don’t want mosquitoes in our ponds - critters that need still water with no oil slick on the surface. Oh, but dragonflies are so nifty. Turnips are edible and easy to grow - keep ‘em. Dandelions are edible and easy to grow - kill it! (seriously, why?) Only a robot with my brain can truly know what I want growing in my garden.

Here is one problem of the modern world - children grow up believing categories have a physical existence that do not because technology is advanced enough to sort it out most of the time. Only when children are exposed to wild nature, if just for short spans of time (like camping), can their minds truly grow.

7.014 Introductory Biology
7.03 Genetics
7.05 General Biochemistry (open courseware doesn’t have this yet! shit)
7.06 Cell Biology

5.111 Principles of Chemical Science
5.12 Organic Chemistry I
20.110J Thermodynamics of Biomolecular Systems

7.02 Experimental Biology & Communications
7.13 Experimental Microbial Genetics
7.17 Experimental Molecular Biology: Biotechnology III (bastards don’t have this yet either..)
7.18 Topics in Experimental Biology

The 3 elective courses yet to be decided, but then again, I do not plan on doing my education entirely this way. Just a couple of classes tops would be ideal. My path will probably go 7.014 -> 7.02 -> try to do my own experimental study -> start at brick & mortar institution. If I do do things this way, then I will need to score very well on the appropriate tests for entry for MS in bioscience and convince people that good self-study + BS in unrelated field should satisfy them…

Drunken flies get hypersexual : Nature News

No time for a real post today (yes, I put a lot of thought into yesterday’s). Enjoy Nature link.

Forest: Shinto Shrine::
Cunt: Panties::

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Not one but ’six giraffe species’

Apparently, molecular evidence suggests that Giraffes are really 6 different species, not 1. Even though their ranges cross, there seems to be no interbreeding. That would seem to mean sexual selection though the guy said they do interbreed in zoos…

So, I’m no biologist (yet!) but it seems to be if you allow merely being on the path to speciation some time in the distant future to constitute a different species, the term species will cease to be of any use. Isn’t this what the term “subspecies” is meant for? It seems a recent trend in zoology is for people to be overly happy with the splitting since molecular phylogeny techniques have gotten so much more precise.

Environmentalists also tend to favor splitting as it can turn what was once one species with only threatened status to several endangered species. Of course, going too far can undermine popular support. If the giraffe was endangered (it’s not currently), I’m sure public support for conservation would be comprehensive. But a more nuanced presentation like “lower Kenyan giraffe needs our help!” seems to only get more blank stares..

Here’s what I want to find out - when they determined that these different types of giraffes are different species, does the data show that they’re as different as different species we take for granted to be different? I know it would be hard to condense all the math down to a scale, but for the public’s consumption, something like “more different than a dog and a dingo, but less than between a dog and a wolf” would help us all grasp the concept. This is reminiscent of how we accept Pluto as a planet, though countless objects at least its size also exist. So what’s odder to have hundreds of planets or for pluto to just be a baby planet? What’s odder, for many species we think of as 1 to really be related species or for a single species to have subspecies differing significantly in appearance and having split apart more than a few million years ago?