Suicide is not the highest form of self-interest

We have a little war going on in this thread. Some people are arguing that we shouldn’t assume human beings are the most important creatures bar none around, while other people are angry that Eric Pianka would have such high regard for other organisms on Earth and would urge us to make room and restrict our population.

I’m personally more sympathetic to the egalitarian view that denies humanity a privileged position, except in our own personal esteem, but OK, let’s play the game. Let’s assume that human beings are the most important, most precious, most essential species on the entire planet—heck, the entire Universe. We must do everything in our power to guarantee their safety and prosperity. I will simply and unilaterally defer to the other side’s opinion.

Now what?

What should we do to maximize the health and happiness of the human race? What are the selfish, self-centered actions that we ought to carry out to make the largest number of people maximally happy for the longest period of time?

I’m afraid that even with my immense concession, your best answer is to listen to the “enviro-wackos”. They’re the ones thinking in the long term about sustainability and diversity. They’re the ones trained to understand all the interactions going on on a healthy planet, who not only appreciate the totality of life here, but are even aware of the rich species diversity here. They’re the ones who realize you can’t pave the planet and use the oceans for a sewer, and expect humanity to survive.

Do you even understand the argument? I’m not saying that we need to preserve the snail darter because it is a valuable organism in and of itself, but because we are screwing over ourselves when we smash and poison our environment to such a degree that as innocuous a creature as a small fish is unable to survive. I’m being greedy, not altruistic. It’s a position both sides ought to understand.

People are trying to argue that we are not currently overpopulated, which is ludicrous. We’re seeing rapid habitat destruction and a wave of extinctions all around the globe; we’re seeing environmental catastrophes that are killing people. If we were in a sustainable balance with our fellow species, we would not be seeing these ongoing and irreversible losses. If your priority is humanity über alles, are you working to conserve energy and slow global warming? Why not? Do you realize that pumping CO2 into the atmosphere and overfishing the oceans and deforesting the tropics is going to reduce the number of people who can live here in peace and prosperity?

It’s exasperating to see so many people pretending that holding humanity in the highest esteem means you’ve got the right to trash your home…your only home.

Calling Dick Wolf!

Hey, I’d watch it: an an academic police procedural. It also sounds like my life right now. Although I did clear away half the piles of clutter on my desks last week, I once again foolishly scheduled exams in both of my courses for the very same week, so I’m frantically scribbling up exams and planning to field lots of student questions for the next few days, and then this weekend I’ll have another big stack of stuff to grade.

Only about five more weeks to the end of this term…

The swiftboating of Eric Pianka

Pianka speaks out. Nick Matzke has a good post on Pianka at the Thumb, addressing the smear campaign against him*. He links to an interview with the good Dr—what he’s saying is simple sense, common in the biological community, and he’s not endorsing mass murder…he’s talking about conservation and planning ahead. Mims is a “crazy kook” who distorted the story and turned it into screaming match.

Get used to it. This is part of the right-wing strategy to attack the academy: when scientists honestly state bad news (and there is much bad news, and it’s growing), they are going to be rabidly accused of all kinds of outrageous crimes. It’s the new McCarthyism. The majority of us do not support short-sighted policy, we don’t endorse jingoism, we are going to urge people to think before acting, we are going to predict the consequences of bad policy, and we are generally going to be critical of demagogues and fools…and that is being treated as a crime.

*Quite unlike the situation with Paul Mirecki; I can’t help but interpret this to mean you’re going to be left twisting in the wind if the right-wing mobs try to lynch you, and you admit you’re godless.

Taphonomy of fossilized embryos

There are these fossilized embryos from the Ediacaran, approximately 570 million years ago, that have been uncovered in the Doushantuo formation in China. I’ve mentioned them before, and as you can see below, they are genuinely spectacular.

i-e8333306e9e2cbeae41d2c276ff4db41-parapandorina.jpg
Parapandorina raphospissa

But, you know, I work with comparable fresh embryos all the time, and I can tell you that they are incredibly fragile—it’s easy to damage them and watch them pop (that’s a 2.3MB Quicktime movie), and dead embryos die and decay with amazing speed, minutes to hours. Dead cells release enzymes that trigger a process called autolysis that digests the embryo from within, and any bacteria in the neighborhood—and there are always bacteria around—descend on the tasty corpse and can turn it into a puddle of goo in almost no time at all. It makes a fellow wonder how these fossils could have formed, and what kind of conditions protect the cells from complete destruction before they were mineralized. Another concern is what kinds of embryos are favored by whatever the process is—is there a bias in the preservation?

Now Raff et al. have done a study in experimental taphonomy, the study of the conditions and processes by which organisms are fossilized, and have come up with a couple of answers for me. Short version: the conditions for rapid preservation are fairly easy to generate, but there is a bias in which stages can be reliably preserved.

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GeekProm!

In the rural fastness of Western Minnesota, a legend grows. A man so nerdly that his infamy spreads far and wide; when people see shell-less molluscs, his name leaps to their lips; when geeks and nerds gather, they all whisper the same thing: “Pee-Zee” (or, as the Canadians and Dr Who fans would say, “Pee-Zed.”)

Yes, in yet another of a string of geek honors, I have been invited to the GeekProm, to be held in the Science Museum of Minnesota on 22 April. There will be spaz-dancing, cow-eye dissections, and a talent show, and some couple will be crowned King and Queen Geek.

Obviously, I deserve to go to this. What you may not realize, O Unsuspecting Readers, is that by reading this site you too are now fully certified Geeks and Nerds. Sorry about that, but it is infectious, and you have only yourselves to blame. I’m also afraid that there aren’t any scientists interested in working on a cure, so you’re just going to have to live with your punishment…and show up to out-spaz me on the dance floor.

See you all there.

Koufax winners are announced!

It’s a marvelous list:

And yay! I’m in there! Thanks to all who voted, and look at all those great links!

How stuff doesn’t work

I am very disappointed. There is this site called How Stuff Works that I’ve run into a few times, that has nice, short, kid-friendly summaries of, obviously enough, how stuff works. I hadn’t used it much, but it seemed like a cool idea…until a reader suggested I take a look at the section on how evolution works.

It’s terrible.

The author has a very, very poor understanding of basic biology, and it looks like the essay was simply spun off the top of his head, with a few quick glances at some websites. The author, Marshall Brain, is an electrical engineer and computer scientist, and it shows, embarrassingly enough.

The whole general introduction is thin and strange and far from how a biologist would discuss it, but rather than going over everything, I’ll focus on one section as an example, a summary of “Holes in the theory“. While giving far too much emphasis to problems than is appropriate, this section has another serious flaw: his holes ain’t holes. All this section is is an airing of the author’s ignorance.

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