ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 665
October 14, 2015
Incredible Preservation Of 125-Million-Year-Old Mammal Shows Soft Tissues And Hair
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The little mammal was only around 24 centimeters (9.5 inches) long. Oscar Sanisidro
Around 125 million years ago, an early mammal was scurrying around a wetland in what is now central Spain. Unfortunately for this little furry creature, it met its end in the watery depths and was quickly buried by fine sediment. In 2011, a team of scientists found the animal preserved in astonishing detail in the rocks of the Las Hoyas Quarry.
Simulation Shows What Happens To Rocks After A Meteor Impact
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Aerial view of Barringer Crater by Shane Torgerson, via Wikimedia Commons
Using a computer simulation, scientists from the University of Stanford in California have managed to visualize what happens to the Earth's crust after a meteorite impact. The findings, published in Nature Materials, were used to predict how minerals would mutate under the extreme conditions produced by such an event.
Robotics Firm Creates 3D-Printed Superhero Prosthetic Arms
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Open Bionics/Disney
A U.K. based robotics company and Disney have joined forces to create 3D-printed prosthetic arms that will get any kid (or even adult) excited.
Open Bionics has created three designs: a glittery arm inspired by Elsa from Frozen, a robotic arm designed to look like Tony Stark’s Iron Man and a lightsaber-themed Star Wars hand. As if that wasn’t cool enough, the lightsaber arm has customized LED lights and creates the iconic lightsaber “wooosh” sound.
The Best Snaps From The Wildlife Photographer Of The Year 2015
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A tale of two foxes. Don Gutoski/Natural History Museum
Canadian photographer Don Gutoski has been named the 2015 Wildlife Photographer of the Year by London’s Natural History Museum for his piece titled "A tale of two foxes."
October 13, 2015
Magnetic Field May Be Map For Migratory Birds
If you're lost, you need a map and a compass. The map pinpoints where you are, and the compass orients you in the right direction. Migratory birds, on the other hand, can traverse entire hemispheres and end up just a couple miles from where they bred last year, using their senses alone. Their compass is the Sun, the stars and the Earth's magnetic field. But their map is a little more mysterious. One theory goes that they use olfactory cues—how a place smells. Another is that they rely on their sense of magnetism.
Researchers in Russia investigated the map issue in a past study by capturing Eurasian reed warblers on the Baltic Sea as they flew northeast towards their breeding grounds near Saint Petersburg. They moved the birds 600 miles east, near Moscow. And the birds just reoriented themselves to the northwest—correctly determining their new position.
Now the same scientists have repeated that experiment—only this time, they didn't move the birds at all. They just put them in cages that simulated the magnetic field of Moscow, while still allowing the birds to experience the sun, stars and smells of the Baltic. Once again, the birds re-oriented themselves to the northwest—suggesting that the magnetic field alone—regardless of smells or other cues, is enough to alter the birds' mental map. The study is in the journal Current Biology. [Dmitry Kishkinev et al, Eurasian reed warblers compensate for virtual magnetic displacement]
And if you're envious of that sixth sense—keep in mind that since the Earth's magnetic field fluctuates, the researchers say magnetic route-finding is best for crude navigation. Meaning for door-to-door directions—you’re still better off with your GPS.
—Christopher Intagliata
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]
Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Wear A Bra, According To Science
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Mellow yellow and magenta bras on display/Shutterstock
October 13th is National No Bra Day, invented to promote breast cancer awareness and to help raise money for research.
Bras are a divisive symbol; some consider them a ludicrous invention, others as a tool for emancipation. Scientifically speaking, the most notorious research on bras and breasts came out a couple of years ago.
Students Create 3D-Printed Wheelchair For Disabled Kitten
Photo credit:
Tiny Kittens/YouTube screenshot
With the help of 3D-printing, this kitten is learning to walk again.
Single Gene Variant Makes Male Worms More Attractive To Other Males
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Nematode worms are frequently used as biological models because of their set number of cells. Ben Goldstein/Wikimedia Commons
The nematode worm is a staple of biological study: It is used in research ranging from aging to nicotine addiction. The tiny worms normally live in one of two states, either as hermaphrodites or males. In the wild, the males are rare and not particularly important for sexual reproduction, but in the lab scientists are able to easily breed them.
This Is The World’s Smallest Known Free-Living Insect
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The smallest free-living insect is similar in size to unicellular organisms. Dr. Alexey Polilov
The beetle Scydosella musawasensis has been declared the world's smallest free-living insect. Besides the cuteness factor, the announcement tells us something about how small insects can actually be. The size is as small as some unicellular organisms.
Who Counts as a Climate Scientist?
A recent study published in Environmental Research Letters, “The climate change consensus extends beyond climate scientists,” offers encouraging data, while at the same time perpetuating many of the errors that plague the public understanding of climate science.
First, the good news. The paper reports the results of university science faculty polling:
Most respondents (93.6%) believe that mean temperatures have risen and most (91.9%) believe in an anthropogenic contribution to rising temperatures. Respondents strongly believe that climate science is credible (mean credibility score 6.67/7). Those who disagree about climate change disagree over basic facts (e.g., the effects of CO2 on climate) and have different cultural and political values. These results suggest that scientists who are climate change skeptics are outliers and that the majority of scientists surveyed believe in anthropogenic climate change and that climate science is credible and mature.
That’s all good to hear, though hardly the first time an overwhelming consensus about the reality of climate change has been demonstrated.
So why am I grumpy about this? Let tackle the problems one by one:
1. “Belief”
This paper repeatedly describes scientists’ views on climate science as beliefs. Here’s how the paper put it:
“Approximately 97% of active, publishing climate scientists believe in anthropogenic climate change.”
“The results show that scientists across disciplines nearly unanimously believe in anthropogenic climate change…”
“Most respondents believed that humans are contributing to the rise in temperatures.”
The problem with using “belief” in place of “accept” or “recognize” is that the word belief implies opinion, implies faith, implies that people think something for reasons other than rational consideration of evidence. Word choice matters, as NCSE’s Glenn Branch explains here and here. We at the NCSE have struggled for decades against creationists who attempt to undermine acceptance of evolution by arguing that scientists’ “belief” in evolution is just one among many equally-valid opinions. But one does not “believe” that atoms exist or that dinosaurs went extinct long before humans; these are simply facts. By using “belief” in this way, the authors have rhetorically invited the Lebowskis of the world to counter, “Yeah, well, you know, that’s just like your opinion, man.”
2. Misuse of “skeptic”
On the heels of the Associated Press’ blunder in changing their language about climate change deniers (for which the AP was taken to task by NCSE’s Josh Rosenau, NPR, and Slate), this paper labels denialists as skeptics, giving unwarranted credence to their crank ideas about climate science. Here’s how the paper puts it:
“...scientists who were climate change skeptics tended to be from older generations”
“These results suggest that scientists who are climate change skeptics are outliers…”
“Scientists who are publicly skeptical about climate science…”
Use of “skeptic” here is wrong. For the sake of consistency, those who deny the legitimacy of climate science must also then reject the methods of science itself; they must dismiss how we learn about the natural world. Rewarding such full-fledged divorcement from reality with the term “skeptic” is inappropriate. It is not advocacy or politics to call things what they are—we’re facing denialism, not skepticism.
3. Who was polled
The more one digs into this paper, the stranger it seems. The authors used questionnaires to poll 2000 randomly selected “biophysical science faculty” from just twelve universities, all in the US Midwest.
The contacted “biophysical” faculty were in “biological sciences, natural sciences, physical sciences, earth sciences, agriculture, environmental sciences, natural resources, and other geosciences.” But the project’s goal was to assess views about climate from “non-climate scientists.” While I can see how one could exclude these disciplines because the degrees do not say “climatology,” in practice climate science is much more than just climatology or atmospheric physics; climate science is very multidisciplinary and integrates fields of knowledge involving not only current changes on earth, but the entire history of earth’s dynamic climate. That means you need researchers who do work as varied as measuring glacial retreat to studying changing migration patterns and struggling marine life to measuring isotopes in gases from delicate air bubbles in cores of ancient ice. It’s as if this paper was set up without much thought to what “non-climate scientists” meant.
Let me give an example by pointing to just one major climate research institution: the University of Colorado Boulder’s INSTAAR (Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research). INSTAAR is a research powerhouse in the earth sciences, claiming on its website that it publishes “more papers in the geosciences—and generate[s] more citations to those papers—than those at any other university in the world.”
A survey of recently published INSTAAR-affiliated papers turns up titles such as “A review of volume-area scaling of glaciers,” “Are anthropogenic changes in the tropical ocean carbon cycle masked by Pacific Decadal Variability?” and “Climate-driven variability in the Southern Ocean carbonate system.” This is real, current climate change research by scientists from a variety of disciplines that would be considered “non-climate” according to the methodology of this Environmental Research Letters paper. A survey of INSTAAR faculty reveals disciplines as varied as geology, geophysics, geography, paleoclimatology, glaciology, hydrology, ecology, evolutionary biology, environmental studies, oceanography—all fields that in this study are “non-climate” disciplines (and all strangely lumped together as “biophysical,” though biophysics is a distinctly different discipline). Clearly, there’s a problem with who seems to count as a climate scientist.
Another major, glaring omission involves adjunct faculty. The paper stated, “Research and adjunct faculty were excluded from data collection because their listing on websites was inconsistent.” But adjunct faculty make up as much as 70% of US college faculty. So to arbitrarily exclude them from this study means it’s missing almost three-quarters of the people involved in this line of work, and whose thoughts about climate change are just as interesting to know as their more-tenured colleagues.
Clearly there are methodological problems with this paper’s very narrow definition of “climate scientist”; indeed, almost half of the “non-climate” participants described climate research as “some” or the “majority” of their work. It might prove interesting, if one really wanted to assess views on climate from non-climate scientists, to assess only the views of faculty who self-reported that their research focus had no intersection with climate change.
4. Maturity and trustworthiness
One of the questions assessed was “Compared to my field, climate science is a mature science.” Respondents were also asked to rank the trustworthiness of climate science. In both cases, respondents seemed to indicate less maturity and less trustworthiness for climate science.
But the problem is in the questions themselves. Juxtapose any discipline against someone’s field, and that person will likely be able to find something critical to say about the other, while bolstering his or her own work. That’s just human nature.
And what does “mature” mean, anyway? Is there a set number of years a discipline needs before it can be considered mature? How many years? Do different disciplines mature at different rates? When do we start the maturity clock of the biological sciences—in 1859, with the Origin of Species, or 1953, when the structure of DNA was discovered? Is genetic testing somehow less scientific or less valid because it is so new? Questions about how “mature” a science is lead not to answers, but to further questions.
Raising the issue of “trustworthiness” is a loaded question; the majority of respondents judged their own field to be “about equally trustworthy,” but the structure of the question forced all other respondents to rank climate science as less or more trustworthy. Unsurprisingly, very few respondents volunteered their field to be untrustworthy.
And why single out climate science on the question of trustworthiness? Is there something specific this question is getting at—the fake scandal of “Climategate,” perhaps? I am unsure of the value of such questions, except to imply a non-existent problem and plant in the respondent’s mind the idea that there should be a reason why climate science cannot be trusted.
In short, there are many encouraging things about this study, and its results are consistent with similar studies showing overwhelming consensus on the topic of climate change. But I would be interested in seeing studies about climate change acceptance that more accurately reflected, and respected, the diversity of scientists involved in climate research.
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