SKEPTICS' DIGEST - AUGUST 2006

Formerly, the CORI Bulletin 
for Members of Central Ohioans for Rational Inquiry.

YOURS FOR BOLOGNA DETECTION SINCE 1996

“What you think you know may not be so.”

(Click on any image to ENLARGE it)

QUOTE / UNQUOTE

Future shock [is] the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.
[Alvin Toffler]

Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question “How?” but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question “Why?”
[Erwin Chargaff, Professor of Biological Chemistry, Columbia University]

The sea is the universal sewer. [Jacques Cousteau]

RETHINKING THE FALL OF EASTER ISLAND

New evidence points to an alternative explanation for a civilization's collapse...

British artist William Hodges traveled to Easter Island (or Rapa Nui, as the island’s inhabitants refer to it) in the 1770s, inspiring this painting of several of the stone statues that have made this locale famous. The island continues to draw both tourists and scientists, in part because of the mystery surrounding the fate of its civilization. A popular account of Rapa Nui’s history casts the inhabitants as the perpetrators and victims of an ecological catastrophe that resulted from overexploiting the island’s resources. New evidence from archaeological work and comparative ecology, however, reveals that this story may need to be rewritten. National Maritime Museum, London

(EXCERPT)
By Terry L. Hunt -
a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he has taught since 1988. He earned his master's degree in anthropology from the University of New Zealand and his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Washington. Hunt has been conducting archaeological field research in the Pacific Islands for nearly 30 years, and he is currently director of the University of Hawaii Rapa Nui Archaeological Field School.

Read the full article @
AMERICAN SCIENTIST online magazine || Sept-Oct 2006

Every year, thousands of tourists from around the world take a long flight across the South Pacific to see the famous stone statues of Easter Island. Since 1722, when the first Europeans arrived, these megalithic figures, or moai, have intrigued visitors. Interest in how these artifacts were built and moved led to another puzzling question: What happened to the people who created them?

In the prevailing account of the island's past, the native inhabitants—who refer to themselves as the Rapanui and to the island as Rapa Nui — once had a large and thriving society, but they doomed themselves by degrading their environment. According to this version of events, a small group of Polynesian settlers arrived around 800 to 900 A.D., and the island's population grew slowly at first. Around 1200 A.D., their growing numbers and an obsession with building moai led to increased pressure on the environment. By the end of the 17th century, the Rapanui had deforested the island, triggering war, famine and cultural collapse.

Jared Diamond, a geographer and physiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has used Rapa Nui as a parable of the dangers of environmental destruction. "In just a few centuries," he wrote in a 1995 article for Discover magazine, "the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism. Are we about to follow their lead?" In his 2005 book Collapse, Diamond described Rapa Nui as "the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources."

… In their book Easter Island, Earth Island, authors John R. Flenley of Massey University in New Zealand and Paul G. Bahn worried about what the fate of Rapa Nui means for the rest of human civilization: "Humankind's covetousness is boundless. Its selfishness appears to be genetically inborn…. But in a limited ecosystem, selfishness leads to increasing population imbalance, population crash, and ultimately extinction."

(Professor Hunt expected to help confirm this story. “Instead,” he relates, “I found evidence that just didn't fit the underlying timeline. As I looked more closely at data from earlier archaeological excavations and at some similar work on other Pacific islands, I realized that much of what was claimed about Rapa Nui's prehistory was speculation. I am now convinced that self-induced environmental collapse simply does not explain the fall of the Rapanui.”)

… The first settlers arrived from other Polynesian islands around 1200 A.D. Their numbers grew quickly, perhaps at about three percent annually, which would be similar to the rapid growth shown to have taken place elsewhere in the Pacific. On Pitcairn Island, for example, the population increased by about 3.4 percent per year following the appearance of the Bounty mutineers in 1790. For Rapa Nui, three percent annual growth would mean that a colonizing population of 50 would have grown to more than a thousand in about a century. The rat population would have exploded even more quickly, and the combination of humans cutting down trees and rats eating the seeds would have led to rapid deforestation. Thus, in my view, there was no extended period during which the human population lived in some sort of idyllic balance with the fragile environment.

It also appears that the islanders began building moai and ahu soon after reaching the island. The human population probably reached a maximum of about 3,000, perhaps a bit higher, around 1350 A.D. and remained fairly stable until the arrival of Europeans. The environmental limitations of Rapa Nui would have kept the population from growing much larger. By the time Roggeveen arrived in 1722, most of the island's trees were gone, but deforestation did not trigger societal collapse, as Diamond and others have argued.

There is no reliable evidence that the island's population ever grew as large as 15,000 or more, and the actual downfall of the Rapanui resulted not from internal strife but from contact with Europeans. When Roggeveen landed on Rapa Nui's shores in 1722, a few days after Easter (hence the island's name), he took more than 100 of his men with him, and all were armed with muskets, pistols and cutlasses. Before he had advanced very far, Roggeveen heard shots from the rear of the party. He turned to find 10 or 12 islanders dead and a number of others wounded. His sailors claimed that some of the Rapanui had made threatening gestures. Whatever the provocation, the result did not bode well for the island's inhabitants.

Newly introduced diseases, conflict with European invaders and enslavement followed over the next century and a half, and these were the chief causes of the collapse. In the early 1860s, more than a thousand Rapanui were taken from the island as slaves, and by the late 1870s the number of native islanders numbered only around 100. In 1888, the island was annexed by Chile. It remains part of that country today.

In the 1930s, French ethnographer Alfred Metraux visited the island. He later described the demise of Rapa Nui as "one of the most hideous atrocities committed by white men in the South Seas." It was genocide, not ecocide, that caused the demise of the Rapanui. An ecological catastrophe did occur on Rapa Nui, but it was the result of a number of factors, not just human short-sightedness.

I believe that the world faces today an unprecedented global environmental crisis, and I see the usefulness of historical examples of the pitfalls of environmental destruction. So it was with some unease that I concluded that Rapa Nui does not provide such a model. But as a scientist I cannot ignore the problems with the accepted narrative of the island's prehistory. Mistakes or exaggerations in arguments for protecting the environment only lead to oversimplified answers and hurt the cause of environmentalism. We will end up wondering why our simple answers were not enough to make a difference in confronting today's problems.

Ecosystems are complex, and there is an urgent need to understand them better. Certainly the role of rats on Rapa Nui shows the potentially devastating, and often unexpected, impact of invasive species…



THAT MUST BE PAINFUL. OR NOT…

With fish farming on the rise, a scientific issue takes on urgency

Jul. 16, 2006.

By Kenneth Kidd, Feature Writer – TORONTO STAR

Do fish feel pain? (These Lake Erie Walleye? Not anymore...)

It sounds like a simple question, one that ought to have a simple, yes-or-no answer — the kind we humans tend to crave. But if there's a query that manages to combine uncertain science, definitional problems and occasionally blind emotion, it's this one.

For a start, even language can get us into trouble. At least in popular Western culture, we have a long history of attributing human motives and emotions to all manner of animals and insects.

It shows up in the bedtime stories we read to our kids and the animated movies we see at the cinema. It's as if humour, shame, pride and sorrow are all part of everyday life in nature, felt and understood by animals in precisely the same way they are by humans.

Lacking other words to describe animal behaviour and motivations, we simply use the ones that would apply to us. That has obvious literary benefits, but does it lead us astray in science?

James Rose, a professor of zoology and physiology at the University of Wyoming, certainly thinks so. "Animals often do things that resemble things that we do," he says. "But it's a very different matter to interpret that (as meaning) they're thinking and planning what they're doing."

That's especially problematic with animals, like fish, that followed a different evolutionary path than humans, endowing them with brains and neurological systems far different from our own. For Rose, fish just don't have the necessary mental equipment to think about and feel pain in the way we do.

"If you look at fish in general, their brain stems are highly developed, but the cerebral hemispheres are not highly developed," he says. "They have the rudiments of what we have, but it just isn't very expanded, and everything I know about things like awareness indicate you've got to have more brainpower upstairs than they have."

In recent years, however, there has been a lot of debate on the pain issue, including a symposium last week at the University of Guelph that featured Victoria Braithwaite, one of the co-authors of a recent (and controversial) British study.

Braithwaite's group looked at the heads of trout and identified two types of so-called nociceptive nerves: A-delta fibres and C fibres. In mammals, A-delta fibres are associated with perceiving instant stimuli (like hitting your thumb with a hammer), and C fibres give you the lingering sense of injury (the subsequent throbbing).

Roughly half of the nociceptive nerves in mammals are C fibres, but in fish that number is typically only four per cent. And some, like sharks, don't have any, so they simply can't detect what we'd recognize as long-term pain or a sense of injury — which probably helps explain why sharks are such ferocious biters, and why their stomachs often include everything from car mufflers to anchors. 

To see whether those nociceptors were working, Braithwaite et al. injected trout with noxious substances (acetic acid or bee venom), and then watched how their behaviour changed. Depending on the experiment, the trout lost their appetites for a time, started beating water through their gills more frequently, or rubbed their noses on the side of the tank.

The study's conclusion: Those nociceptors were doing their job and the fish were reacting to pain.

But were they? Or was it just an unthinking reflex in the face of a negative stimulus?

"I would say they can certainly perceive pain," says Braithwaite, a senior lecturer in evolutionary biology at the University of Edinburgh. "Whether they feel it as an emotion, I would think they probably do."

This is where the definitional problems come in. What exactly is pain? Is it just any negative stimulus, or does the experience of pain require a higher consciousness, including self-awareness, memory and the ability to think and plan?

Academics can spend a lot of time debating the precise nature of "consciousness," but from a clinical, neurological perspective, instinctive reflexes aren't part of the mix.

"It's not just the ability to perceive and react to negative stimuli," says Richard Moccia, a professor of animal science at Guelph. "That isn't pain. Pain really is psychological at a higher level. We're really thinking about a higher level of consciousness being required."

And do fish have that consciousness? "The jury," says Moccia, "is still out on that."

Even Braithwaite, who readily uses words like pain and fear when talking about fish, isn't sure they're conscious.

"I would say that some of the behaviours of fish are much more sophisticated than we would have given them credit for, say, a decade ago," says Braithwaite. "Whether that means they're conscious, I feel very uncomfortable about. I would say we don't have enough evidence to say that they are." 

There is, on both sides of the issue, fairly wide agreement that too much cognitive ability might actually be a very bad thing for a fish, since taking time for thought could prove fatal.

 "They've got to be vigilant all of the time, whether they're a predator or prey," says Rose. "I've watched bonefish and sharks interact in the Bahamas, and everybody's got to pay attention all the time, because when a shark takes off, it's pretty abrupt."

So why, then, this renewed interest in whether fish experience pain? It all has to do with fish farming, which has lately come under attack by some animal-rights groups, especially in Europe.

And if you want fish farming to be governed by the same sort of rules that have long applied to the treatment of traditional farm animals, then it's more than a little helpful to have fish considered as being not much different than cattle or sheep.

As Braithwaite puts it: "The problem we have with fish is that they have this reputation of being cold-blooded, dim-witted creatures. People who do work with fish tend to think, oh well, you know, they're fish, it doesn't matter.

"We needed to say, well, actually, they're not that different from mammals and birds, because they have the same pain-processing equipment that we associate with animals."

The claimed existence of pain, in other words, might help ensure that farmed fish are treated and killed humanely. So, yes, there is an agenda. But do we really need unchallenged evidence of pain — and consciousness — to make us act humanely?

Gary Varner, an ethical theorist and philosophy professor at TexasA&M University, argues we don't need to go quite that far. "It's not as if one finding is going to come in and carry the day."

All you need to make is a so-called argument by analogy, he says. If X has these 10 characteristics and Y has nine of them, chances are Y also has the tenth. From a philosophical perspective, you end up treating farmed fish as if you knew for certain they experienced pain, despite the lack of scientific proof.

This would, at any rate, work out better for the fish — and might even be preferable to harvesting them from the ocean. "The only vertebrates I eat are fish," Varner says. "When I'm out fishing and I hook a fish, I do my best to kill it quickly, but maybe that could be better done under more controlled conditions. It wouldn't surprise me at all if fish farming, at least in ideal conditions, turned out to be a far better way to raise and harvest fish."

REVIEW: LAWS OF NATURE

Read the full review by Robert Lee Hotz – a Los Angeles Times staff writer who covers science HERE:

… Darwin clearly understood the challenge that natural selection posed to the conventional Victorian Christian faith that sustained his friends and family. No one was more reluctant to espouse it publicly or more distressed by its implications. Indeed, it steadily undermined his own belief in God, drove a wedge in his marriage and nearly broke his health. He brooded privately over his findings for 21 years before making them public.

Yet he finally embraced his brainchild, impelled by an unflinching intellectual honesty, the weight of the evidence and the imperative of an undeniable idea. "There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection," Darwin wrote, "than in the course which the wind blows."

A century and a half ago, Charles Darwin sparked a scientific revolution. Now that revolution has become a culture war. But does the concept of “intelligent design” have validity as an alternative to evolution? Three new books look beyond the rhetoric.



July 30, 2006

The Reluctant Mr. Darwin
An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution
David Quammen
Atlas Books/W.W. Norton: 304 pp., $22.95

Intelligent Thought
Science Versus the Intelligent Design Movement
Edited by John Brockman
Vintage: 258 pp., $14 paper

Why Darwin Matters
The Case Against Intelligent Design
Michael Shermer
Times Books/Henry Holt: 202 pp., $22

In the border war between science and faith, the doctrine of "intelligent design" is a sly subterfuge — a marzipan confection of an idea presented in the shape of something more substantial.
Read the full review HERE:

Have you got your Monkey Fish T-Shirt yet?

FALLACIOUS ASSAULTS

THE FERTILITY GAP
Liberal politics will prove fruitless as long as liberals refuse to multiply.

By Arthur C. Brooks on the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page
Tuesday, August 22, 2006 


Professor PZ Myer was surprised, then amused, as he took Professor Brooks figures and assumptions apart:

In a surprising discovery, reading the Wall Street Journal opinion pages will make you 57% dumber, will kill 8,945,562,241 neurons, and will force you to invent ridiculous statistics.

... Arthur Brooks, billed as a professor at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Public Affairs, has written an incredibly stupid article, arguing that because Republican parents outbreed Democratic parents, their party will have a growing lock on government. The numbers, though, simply don't make sense, nor does the logic. He first claims that there is a "fertility gap" of 41% between liberals and conservatives, and then in a fit of innumerate fervor, claims this will generate a rapid imbalance.

A state that was split 50-50 between left and right in 2004 will tilt right by 2012, 54% to 46%. By 2020, it will be certifiably right-wing, 59% to 41%. A state that is currently 55-45 in favor of liberals (like California) will be 54-46 in favor of conservatives by 2020--and all for no other reason than babies.

Hold it—an 8% difference in the voting population generated in eight years? By differential reproduction alone? That's simply ludicrous, and I'd sure like to know what kind of calculations this professor made to estimate that. Net population growth in the US is about 0.6% per year, and even assuming every single person entering their majority joins the Republican party, you get less than a 5% difference in 8 years of growth. Fortunately, I don't have to stretch my brain at all this morning: Steve Reuland has done the actual calculations for Ohio. Basically, all you need to know is that in a state with a population of 11 million, there's a net gain of about 40,000 new individuals, which may be split with a small advantage to Republican households, but that's going to be a small gain. There's just no way it can add up to such a huge difference over a few years.

Also, Steve points out that migration is a bigger contributor to population changes, swamping out these birth differences. Need I point out as well that Republicanism and Democratic party membership are not fixed genetic properties? Brooks mentions that about 80% of the people vote the same way as their parents (given the quality of his understanding of statistics, though, I view that number with a jaundiced eye), but doesn't seem to understand that that 20% that differ is a greater factor than the small difference in reproductive rate. Well, not the rate that he claims, but those numbers are screwy.

I also have doubts about his base statistics that argue for this amazing Republican fecundity. Shouldn't these basic demographic facts make you wonder about his estimates?

Higher fertility has been a major source of population growth among minority groups. Hispanics have the highest fertility rate of any U.S. minority, with the average Hispanic woman giving birth to three children in her lifetime. The African-American fertility rate is 2.2 lifetime births per woman. Non-Hispanic whites have the lowest fertility rate of 1.8, about 14 percent below the "replacement rate" of 2.1.

Last I looked, the Republican party does not have a significant minority component. However, I am not going to make the stupid mistake that Brooks does, and assume that these unhatched chickens are all going to flock to the party of my choice...

Among the COMMENTS @ PZ's blog were these:

I can see that Brooks needs some help with his numbers. Statistics show that if you add a decimal place, 23.7% more people will believe you.

Wait, PZ, now you've gone and destroyed the only pick up line I had left - we have to do it or the Republicans win!

And finally...

Did you hear the one about how the adders were about to go extinct until someone gave them tables made from logs? With log tables even adders can multiply!

NOT ON PLANES, I HOPE!!

Good fortune. COMMENT! Please spread the meme. Don’t smoke in bed…