"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a
rather scornful tone, "it means just what I
choose it to mean - neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can
make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all."
Through the Looking Glass.
At 12:58 PM 3/16/2012, Andrew Pierce wrote:
While the definition you provide might be a suitable working definition, it
is not a suitable scientific definition. As a counter-example to your
claim "it
was not taken there by human agency, but either evolved there or migrated
there prior to human record keeping" there are species that the first
humans brought to North America; these species violate the either-or
construction of your definition because we don't even 'know' all of the
species that came to North America this way.
To further push the envelope, what about species that were moved around by
other hominids (*Homo habilis, H. erectus*) or neandertals? Are they native
because they weren't moved by *H. sapiens*? Or are the non-native because
they were moved by agents?
What about species that were introduced by humans and then evolved into new
species? Is the introduced species non-native, but the evolutionary
descendant is native? Appeals to the crowd (*argument ad populum*) do not
invalidate these critiques and neither do *ad hominem *attacks.
Finally, the point that 'native' is a definition that eludes us still
stands. While local and pragmatic definitions of it might exist, a global,
scientifically defensible definition of it does not exist.
Andrew D. Pierce, Ph.D
Post-Doctoral Research Associate
Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Management
University of Hawai'i
USFS-Institute of Pacific Islands Forestry
On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 4:42 PM, David L. McNeely <mcnee...@cox.net> wrote:
> well, you can make word games out of simple concepts if you wish to.
> Whenever most sane people refer to a species as being native in a place,
> they mean it was not taken there by human agency, but either evolved there
> or migrated there prior to human record keeping. Pretty simple. The other
> constructs you mention complicate matters, yes, but they do not define the
> concept of a species being native to a locality. The multiple maps of
> native range for ponderosa pine may be based on different data sets, or
> they may be based on different definitions of the species. Those matters
> do not alter what is meant by a species being native in a location, they
> just illustrate that we don't always have all the information, or that
> sometimes we disagree on the data.
>
> mcneely
>
> ---- Matt Chew <anek...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Jason Persichetti's contention, "we all know what is meant by the idiom"
> is
> > precisely false.
> >
> > I routinely show audiences eight different maps purporting to represent
> the
> > native range of _Pinus_ponderosa_, prepared for different purposes by
> > different authorities. They can't all be correct AND mean the same
> thing.
> >
> > What "native species" denotes actually varies quite a bit, and no wonder,
> > since it includes three explicit degrees of freedom (specifications of
> > place, time, and taxon) at least two tacit ones (who counts as a human,
> and
> > what counts as human agency) plus an authority claim.
> >
> > Authority claims alone entail ad hoc redefinitions of "native"; e.g.,
> USGS
> > NAS roils the waters by calling _Micropterus_salmoides_ a "native
> > transplant" in the United States outside a particular set of hydrologic
> > units. That is a political calculation.
> >
> > What "native species" connotes also varies, but recently, typically
> > indicates the idiomist is making or ratifying a judgment that some
> organism
> > has a moral claim to persisting in a specified place because no human is
> > known to have physically moved it or its forbears. But we relax
> various
> > aspects of that as easily as we apply them.
> >
> > As is (remarkably) typical of ecology's idioms, we have no calibrated
> > conception of this supposedly fundamental characteristic. Blaming the
> > shortcomings of language for our failure to formulate a coherent concept
> is
> > a red herring unless our consensus "native" really is an inarticulable
> > intuition. If it is (and nothing I've read so far suggests otherwise)
> > there's nothing to calibrate, much less recalibrate, and we're not doing
> > science.
> >
> > Matthew K Chew
> > Assistant Research Professor
> > Arizona State University School of Life Sciences
> >
> > ASU Center for Biology & Society
> > PO Box 873301
> > Tempe, AZ 85287-3301 USA
> > Tel 480.965.8422
> > Fax 480.965.8330
> > mc...@asu.edu or anek...@gmail.com
> > http://cbs.asu.edu/people/profiles/chew.php
> > http://asu.academia.edu/MattChew
>
> --
> David McNeely
>
David Cameron Duffy
Professor of Botany and Unit Leader
Pacific Cooperative Studies Unit (PCSU)
University of Hawai`i
3190 Maile Way St. John 410
Honolulu, HI 96822-2279
(808) 956-8218 phone
(808) 956-4710 fax / (808) 956-3923 (backup fax)
email address: ddu...@hawaii.edu
