Re: [ECOLOG-L] Used a tablet for field work?
David, and others, I'd like to tell you about an app that the developer and I worked out together - and it is configurable by the user. My idea was to make a data entry program for my iPod touch and he had an app that almost worked. I wrote, and gave suggestions and he developed. Now the app is configurable and could be used for a wide variety of types of field data. The app is: Forms (customizable) http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/forms-customizable/id503870383?mt=8 and was written by: Sreedhar And you can find it in iTunes. It is reasonably priced, especially considering that it so flexible. Cheers, Jim On 12/05/16 12:42, David Inouye wrote: I'd like a way to replace data entry on paper in the field with an electronic alternative. Ultimately the data end up in a spreadsheet, but sometimes using formulae (e.g., 3*5 + 4*2 + 6, for numbers of inflorescences with different numbers of flowers). Has anyone used something like the Blackberry PlayBook, an Android tablet, Nook, iPad, etc. with spreadsheet software? Recommendations for or against particular solutions? I have also considered a ruggedized PC and a ruggedized tablet (Motion F5V), but they are a LOT more expensive than other tablet options would be. David Inouye -- James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecologia, Evolução e Dinâmicas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres Currículo Lattes http://lattes.cnpq.br/2553295738925812 Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil E-mail: jjro...@gmail.com mailto:jjro...@gmail.com Telefone: 55 41 36730409 Celular: 55 41 98182559 Skype-in (USA):+1 706 5501064 Skype-in (Brazil):+55 41 39415715 Ecologia de Ecossistemas na UVV http://www.uvv.br/ensino/mestrado/inicio.aspx?id=2 Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Home Page http://sites.google.com/site/jjroper/ Ars Artium Consulting http://sites.google.com/site/arsartium In Google Earth, copy and paste - -25.5217, -49.0925
[ECOLOG-L] Field course, Panamá
Dear all, I am announcing (again) a field course I will be teaching in Panamá, in Bocas del Toro, this July-August. Please check out our web pages: http://www.itec-edu.org/ http://www.itec-edu.org/spanishbird.html It will be a fun mixture of methods and theory to get at some ideas of how the birds of the Bocas Archipelago got their current distribution patterns. We will begin by birding in a variety of places on the island of Colón until everybody is familiar with the birds, and then we will use the techniques we standardized on Colón on as many of the other islands as we can get to, to do fairly comprehensive sampling. With the data we gather, we will then analyse them in a variety of ways to find the best model to explain the island birds. Also, the course is going to be an attempt at multicultural interactions. I speak Spanish and Portuguese, and anybody that speaks any of the three (including English) can take the course - I hope that everybody has at least a modicum of English, and that some English speakers will have a modicum of Spanish or Portuguese. I have already had courses with Brazilians AND Spanish AND English speaking students from a variety of countries, and they were great! The course is open to anybody with the will to take it - it will be some hard work, but will be fascinating and fun at the same time. If you have any questions, please feel free to write. If you are unsure if you are qualified to take the course, but would like to, please write me and we can talk about it. Sincerely, Jim
[ECOLOG-L] Field course - Birds, Island Biogeography and Methods in Bocas del Toro
Hello all, For those interested in examining island biogeography in the Bocas del Toro archipelago, in Panamá, here is an updated link. http://itec-edu.org/spanishbird.html Cheers, Jim
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Backpacking with an infant?
It is interesting to see how this discussion is going. Almost all women are positive about the idea and men are less so. And, it is NOT true that the child safety is paramount, because it must be that the ADULT safety is paramount. After all, if the adult falls down a cliff, so does this child. And, I think that a rational person doing field work in difficult terrain is probably also doing their best to make sure that their own safety, and thereby the safety of others along, is insured. I second the motion that we can assume that the parent who asks what is a good baby carrier is a rational person interested in insuring their own, and their baby's, survival. And, I think that we need a system in which marriage or kids is NOT a detriment to their careers. On 12/04/09 17:08, David L. McNeely wrote: I originally responded only to Simone personally. But, I now see a need for wider discussion. I agree with Hal Caswell and others who have said that child safety is paramount. If at all possible, another approach should be considered.
[ECOLOG-L] Field course, Panama, tropical island biogeography, birds
Field Course in Ecology and Conservation Biology Focus Island Biogeography and birds as model animals for learning to use statistical tools to analyze animal abundance, within the context of the Bocas del Toro Archipelago. Instructor James J. Roper (jjro...@gmail.com, and http://sites.google.com/site/jjroper/) Dates: 23 July to 9 August 2012 Details: We are offering a multi-cultural field course that will start with training the student in the local avifauna of the island of Colon, in the Bocas del Toro Archipelago, AND, the using three very useful and interesting statistical programs for studying animal diversity and abundance EstimateS, PRESENCE and DISTANCE (all free programs that you can download and install prior to the course). We will quickly put those tools to work on the island where we will carry out many transects in different habitats to apply those data to the use of these programs. To do so, we will divide ourselves into smaller teams so that we may cover more ground. We will then proceed to other islands (once we are all up to running speed) and do several transects on as many islands as possible. We will close the course by combining these data into a coherent and interesting study of diversity and abundance of these birds on the island, putting this into a context of island biogeography. Additional statistical analysis may use the program R, and within it, the BiodiversityR package (also free). Throughout the study, we will use the relevant literature and have many discussions about the theory and application of these ideas. Prior to the course, the instructor will communicate with the students providing a list of reading, mostly PDF files that can be shared among those in the course. Who can take the course? Clearly the course will be somewhat advanced, so students who wish to take the course should have already taken at least one course in statistics, and be interested in learning birds (while the methods can be applied to a whole variety of taxa, birds are probably the easiest models to use in a quick field course). In addition to graduate students, we will consider advanced undergraduate students who can convince the instructor with a well-written objective letter that they deserve to take the course. Also, as we feel as an institute that it is very important to have cross-cultural interactions while studying conservation and ecology in a tropical environment, Spanish and Portuguese speaking students are welcome to attend. Clearly, if everybody speaks some English, and some Portuguese or Spanish, communication will be much easier. The instructor, Jim Roper (Ph.D.), is fluent in all three languages, and wants to carry out this experiment in a multicultural multispecies interaction. We will work together to develop teams that will combine their interests and skills so that all teams work well together and have a fascinating time learning. Costs: See the web site for tuition rates. Students from Central and South America, who attend shools in Central and South America, and are accepted for the course, will all receive the same scholarship the course at half price. By this scholarship, we recognize that with the exchange rate and local economies being what they are, this scholarship pursues our goals and interests in collaborating with students in these countries and contributing to the general state of education and conservation. Also, because we will be going to the islands as often as possible, we will have a small surcharge of $5 from each student for each boat trip. Additional information: Please get in contact with Jim Roper (jjro...@gmail.com, and http://sites.google.com/site/jjroper/) with any questions. Please read over the web pages at ITEC as well (http://www.itec- edu.org) to better understand the field station and situation in Panamá.
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Hypothesis testing in ecology
I've been meaning to comment here too. When I teach statistics, my goal is to give the graduate students a toolbox if you will, of useful ways to test ideas. More complex statistics comes later. In teaching, I use the idea of testing hypotheses, with a very important caveat. Both, null and alternative hypotheses have to be biologically sensible and biologically possible. I know I find many published papers that gloss over the null, but it turns out, on deeper inspection, that it was not a possibility and so refuting it was unavoidable. Apply that idea, that the null also must be reasonable, logical and possible, and you may find that many null hypotheses are none of those. Jim On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 13:13, Kevin Mueller kem...@psu.edu wrote: If we iteratively modify our hypotheses through the process of data collection, data analysis, or manuscript preparation, how different is this process from observational or exploratory research? It is, of course, different to some debatable extent. Regardless, I think Paul's comments shed light on the reality that there is a large gray area between the extremes of purely observational studies and purely hypothesis driven studies (which his 2005 paper apparently documents). Given this, I find the explicit or underlying claims of superiority made by proponents of hypothesis driven research to ring false (despite some of the strong benefits of hypothesis testing that Paul and others have made clear). I find such claims ironic since the result of many observational or exploratory studies is, gasp, a hypothesis. Finally, regardless of the language we use to reference hypotheses in our introductions, I ask: Is it always beneficial to cloak studies that are somewhat exploratory behind a veil of singlular hypothesis testing? Or might we also sometimes gain and share insights by making the process of data exploration and hypothesis testing/modification more apparent in our manuscripts? To be clear, my comments are more in response to a general narrow-mindedness that I've observed among some natural scientists, not to any particular post or 'poster' in this recent thread (i.e. I found Paul's post insightful and not especially narrow-minded). Kevin Mueller On Mar 9, 2011, at 11:00 PM, Paul Grogan wrote: Furthermore, often during the data interpretation or write-up stage, additional reflection on the processes of experimentation and evaluation of the data may indicate to the scientist (or to a manuscript reviewer) that the test did not reflect the hypothesis as well as originally thought. In such cases, further refinement or editing of the hypothesis statement should be made so that the final research output – the peer-reviewed publication disseminating the new knowledge – is as accurate and accessible to others as possible. As a result, I usually finish my manuscript Introduction sections with: “We used our data to test the following hypotheses” (rather than “We tested the following hypotheses... which gives the impression of great foresight on the part of the author).
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Climate Change Data
Wayne, isn't somewhat of a trick question? I mean, in science, we have a tough time saying that anything except the trivial is unequivocal. Also, is it even theoretically possible to unequivocally demonstrate a difference in climate due to natural or to human causes? Especially when they are operating simultaneously. And, as for prediction, I have yet to see models that based on the past do well at predicting the present, in both, natural and human dominated systems. However, there are plenty of data with plants and animals showing trends that are consistent with climate change, and also, a considerable amount of good logic supports anthropogenic climate change. What more could a realistic person want? Cheers, Jim On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 18:42, Wayne Tyson landr...@cox.net wrote: Hi all, Can anyone tell me or direct me to a source that can tell me unequivocally and quantitatively what the direct and indirect effects of human influence are and are projected to be compared to the background or natural influences with respect to global temperature changes and predicted states? Is there any information on the conditions of life in the past which match those states and their probable causes? WT - Original Message - From: Sudhir Raj Shrestha sudhir_...@yahoo.com To: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:35 AM Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] Climate Change Data Hi Steve, In addition to Ben's comprehensive list, I will suggest you to look at NOAA's new (still prototype, we are working on it) climate portal. www.climate.gov Thanks, Sudhir Shrestha --- On Tue, 3/15/11, Benjamin White bgwh...@umd.edu wrote: From: Benjamin White bgwh...@umd.edu Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] Climate Change Data To: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Date: Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 6:17 PM Steve, Contrary to adopting the approach of utilizing dumbed-down on-line climate tutorials, I find that the easiest way to initially engage interested parties is to refer them to summaries for decision makers and to content-rich web sites. Here you will often find scientific or policy organizations' bottom line ref. findings, data and methods. Consider, perhaps, some climate findings, reports and resources from: - a summary of global environment, including climate: http://www.unep.org/geo/geo4/media/GEO4%20SDM_launch.pdf (GEO5 will soon be out and it is my personal expectation that climate change will be cast in a slightly different light) - http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtml#1 and http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_ipcc_fourth_assessment_report_synthesis_report.htm - Geenhouse gas, etc. data: http://unfccc.int/ghg_data/items/3800.php - CCSP provides an umbrella for US data data on climate change: http://www.climatescience.gov/default.php (e.g. http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap4-2/final-report/default..htm ) - CIESIN and SEDAC provide a wealth of material, particular on the human dimensions of climate change e.g. the Geographic Distribution of Climate Change Vulnerability. A review of their site is will definitely stimulate discussion: http://www.ciesin.columbia.edu/index.html Some selected readings from the IPCC4 report, along with figures, etc. should be a good place to start. There are always developments in the realm of climate science that are worth consideration (for example, modeling the influence of grassroots climate change mitigation efforts). A review of the some of the contemporary articles in Nature, Science, New Scientist (their ask a climate scientist blog is really cool: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2010/12/ask-a-climate-scientist.html) etc. will likely provide material for a significantly enriched discussion. You are correct to be wary of data or findings from organizations which lack scientific objectivity. ***I am sure other people on the list will be able to add to the suggested sites above. Cheers, --Ben White Original message Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2011 22:01:40 -0400 From: Steven Roes steven.roe...@houghton.edu Subject: [ECOLOG-L] Climate Change Data To: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Hi All, I'm preparing to teach few days on climate change to my high school living environment students. We are nearing the conclusion of our ecology unit, and they've been soaking up the material like sponges--I've been incredibly happy to see thier progress as an entire group. I'm working on researching for these few days climate change, and I'm in need of trustworthy data with some discussion that, ideally, my students can understand. If necessary, I can work to translate any discussion to more appropriate language. Could any of you point me in the direction of where to find non-biased information on the issue of climate change and rising CO2 levels that is worthy of presenting? Thanks in advance for your help, Steve
Re: [ECOLOG-L] field safety manual for mammal/herp/tick project
The manual is good, but there are a few small errors. Tick rainthe manual says that ticks do not fall on passersby, but indeed they do. I have been colonized by ticks that way in both Panama and Paraguay. In Paraguay, when the truck I was riding on went under a tick infested branch of tree (actually, the preceding truck) the ticks apparently sense the CO2 and dropped, landing on the people in the back of the truck that followed. It happened more than once and was easily verified. In Panama, I was sitting in the understory waiting while looking up with binoculars. Every now and then, I felt dust on my face. I pulled out my compass with mirror and discovered that the dust was ticks. As I plucked them from my face, their numbers were growing, on my face and not by climbing to my face. Finally, I noticed that they were all over my body, so I moved. In the field, I have done the simple experiment. Tick walks up arm or leg or finger. If you merely fan the tick with your hand (passing an air current), they cling, but if you breathe or blow on it, the tick often drops, presumably from smelling CO2. Now I have not done this experiment with ticks everywhere, but everywhere I have done it, the ticks respond the same way. Cheers, Jim Diane S. Henshel wrote on 19-Jun-10 14:24: Thanks for a great start on a manual many will use!
Re: [ECOLOG-L] worlds authorities in sustainable ag/meat/ag ecology
I would suggest that there are no world authorities for feeding 10 billion people. As it is, the green revolution came with cheap oil. Food will only be harder to produce with less energy and more mouths to feed. Certainly I agree with Beth that the big companies are in it for the profit and not their concern for either sustainability or the human condition. As Garret Hardin said - Nobody dies of overpopulation (of course, he was speaking tongue in cheek, because they die of disease, starvation, inadequate health care, extreme working conditions and so on and so forth, all due to overpopulation). Jim Wendee Holtcamp wrote on 24-Jun-10 12:13: Who would you say are the world's leading authorities in agricultural ecology (how can we feed the world given our rates of consumption, increased meat demand, that kind of thing)? What questions are actively being addressed (besides the above) by academics that are hot topics in ag ecology right now for both the US and internationally? From the Bering Sea.. Wendee My adventures in the Bering Sea ~ http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond ~~ Wendee Holtcamp, M.S. Wildlife Ecology ~ @bohemianone Freelance Writer * Photographer * Bohemian http://www.wendeeholtcamp.com http://www.wendeeholtcamp.com/ http://bohemianadventures.blogspot.com http://bohemianadventures.blogspot.com/ ~~ 6-wk Online Writing Course Starts July 24 (signup by Jun 17) ~~ ~~~ I'm Animal Planet's news blogger - http://blogs.discovery.com/animal_news
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Humans in the definition of ecosystems
Not only that, but if you have read Ricklefs 2008, the Disintegration of the Ecological Community (Am. Nat 172:741 - DOI: 10.1086/593002), you might even realize that THAT ecosystem definition leaves a lot to be desired, especially the part interacting as a functional unit. Cheers, Jim Fabrice De Clerck wrote on 25-Jun-10 12:20: Dear Friends, An environmental economist colleague of mine is disappointed with the CBD definition of ecosystems which gives the impression that only pristine areas are ecosystems. Can anyone point us to a more recent definition of ecosystems that explicitly includes humans as an integral part of the definition? Here is the original question: The CBD defines ecosystems as a dynamic complex of plant, animal and micro-organism communities and their non-living environment interacting as a functional unit. I find this boring, as it leaves us humans, as special animals, out of the picture. When you read it, it is easy to think of pristine environments. Has there been any reaction or correction of this definition? I need an authoritative quote that balances the CBD´s All reactions welcome, and citations welcome! Fabrice Fabrice DeClerck PhD Community and Landscape Ecologist Division of Research and Development CATIE 7170, Turrialba, Costa Rica 30501 (506) 2558-2596 fadecle...@catie.ac.cr Adjunct Research Scholar Tropical Agriculture Programs The Earth Institute at Columbia University -- James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecology, Evolution and Population Dynamics of Terrestrial Vertebrates Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil E-mail: jjro...@gmail.com mailto:jjro...@gmail.com Telefone: 55 41 36730409 Celular: 55 41 98182559 Skype-in (USA):+1 706 5501064 Skype-in (Brazil):+55 41 39415715 Ecology and Conservation at the UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Home Page http://jjroper.googlespages.com James Roper's citations http://www.mendeley.com/profiles/james-roper1/ In Google Earth, copy and paste - 25 31'18.14 S, 49 05'32.98 W
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Science and Religion are we getting off track?
into the causes of the disaster that leads to improvements in mine safety, and the grieving widows should support this. All too often the religious explanation (god's will) is seen as a valid alternative to the scientific one (negligence). But of course no scientist can prove that these disasters are not god's will! For me the fundamental issue is whether we act scientifically, that is to say on the basis of evidence and reason, or whether we defer to religious belief. This leaves plenty of room for mysticism and the kind of ecstasy that E. O. Wilson wrote about, for prayer and holy celebrations. But to act irrationally on the basis of one's religious beliefs in a way that causes harm to people or to anything else in our environment is in my opinion an abomination. Bill Silvert No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 8.5.437 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/2893 - Release Date: 05/24/10 06:26:00 -- James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecology, Evolution and Population Dynamics of Terrestrial Vertebrates Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil E-mail: jjro...@gmail.com mailto:jjro...@gmail.com Telefone: 55 41 36730409 Celular: 55 41 98182559 Skype-in (USA):+1 706 5501064 Skype-in (Brazil):+55 41 39415715 Ecology and Conservation at the UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Home Page http://jjroper.googlespages.com Ars Artium Consulting http://arsartium.googlespages.com In Google Earth, copy and paste - 25 31'18.14 S, 49 05'32.98 W
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Science and Religion Dogmatic conflict?
. The effect was strangely calming. Breathing and heartbeat diminished, concentration intensified. It seemed to me that something extraordinary in the forest was very close to where I stood, moving to the surface and discovery. ... I willed animals to materialize and they came erratically into view. What does this passage, which describes an experience I suspect most members of this list have had, most resemble? It sounds a lot like how practitioners of some types of meditation describe their experience. But what is this naturalist's trance good for, other than science? Hunting, gathering and looking out for predators! Maybe, just maybe, this was our ancestors' normal state of consciousness and maybe various religious and spiritual practices arose as a way of recapturing this state as, for biological and social reasons, our minds changed. This is, of course, a guess, but what do you folks think? Jane Shevtsov -- James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecology, Evolution and Population Dynamics of Terrestrial Vertebrates -- Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil -- E-mail: jjro...@gmail.com Telefone: 55 41 36730409 Celular: 55 41 98182559 Skype-in (USA):+1 706 5501064 Skype-in (Brazil):+55 41 39415715 -- Ecology and Conservation at the UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Home Page http://jjroper.googlespages.com Ars Artium Consulting http://arsartium.googlespages.com In Google Earth, copy and paste - 25 31'18.14 S, 49 05'32.98 W --
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Science and Religion Dogmatic conflict?
Dave had a question that at first glance seems tough to answer, but it reminds me of what I teach my biostatistics students. Rule number one, never do anything unless you can explain exactly why you did that thing (as opposed to any other option), and you have to explain that to your mother so that she understands your choice. So, sufficient knowledge is enough that you could explain the topic to someone else to their satisfaction. Therefore, if you feel that if you were called on in a crowd to explain string theory and you would decline thinking that you didn't know enough, well then, you don't know enough. Thus, we are each our own judge on this matter. If I can't explain something so that you can understand it, then I don't know it well enough to have an opinion on it. Cheers, Jim On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 18:55, Derek Pursell dep1...@yahoo.com wrote: Mr. Roper makes an excellent point here; the value of establishing that one should not have an opinion (interpretation: bias?) before studying or gaining further knowledge of a subject is invaluable to the pursuit of knowledge. This principle applies for scientific and non-scientific purposes. This idea, so presented, does bring up another question: what would we like to define as sufficient knowledge in order to justify having an opinion on a subject? From my personal experience, people tend to form opinions on subjects relatively early in the process of learning about them (if indeed, any meaningful degree of learning takes place), so the perils are obvious. Granted, the definition of sufficient knowledge is broadly interpretative and would vary from subject to subject, but it can be troublesome because of the age-old issue of how people define and use the same word to mean many different things.
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Science and Religion Dogmatic conflict?
I think that some of us may forget about the possibility of NOT forming opinions. On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 18:50, Frank Marenghi frank_maren...@hotmail.comwrote: I agree with Mr. Sibley. It would be impossible for each of us to weigh all of the evidence available on every issue and come up with our own rational conclusions On those things we know little or nothing, we do NOT really have to have an opinion. I am reminded of a lay friend who told me outright that global warming was not happening (I think she thinks it is a communist plot). I asked her, why do you even HAVE an opinion on this matter, when you know nothing of the subject? After all, if it is, or is not, occurring, it is not a matter of opinion. Just like evolution - not a matter of opinion. So, if the situation is such that I cannot weigh ENOUGH evidence, I don't come to conclusions either. So, if someone asks me what I think of the grand unified theory of physics, I will say, I don't know enough to form a good viewpoint. That is a much freer position, and more logical for a scientist. Read Futuyma's review of the book What Darwing got wrong (the review is titled Two Critics Without a Clue) and you will see what happens when ill-informed people try to make an argument based on insufficient knowledge of a subject. So, as scientists, when we don't know enough about a subject, we should suspend judgement of that subject, or learn more. But, we should definitely NOT feel obliged to have opinions about that of which we know nothing. Religion is often just that - forming opinions on that about which one knows little or nothing. Cheers, JIm
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Science and Religion Dogmatic conflict? Re: [ECOLOG-L] evolution for non-scientists textbook
But Bill, Feyerabend meant that the verdict was rational and just within the context of church DOCTRINE at that time. And, remember, that was at the time that the Pope Urban VIII. He had a list of his own foibles to worry about, so it isn't clear whether Feyerabend's opinion was actually well-founded. However, I think we could say that science should be evidence-based, while religion is not based on evidence. And, I think all religions (if by religion we mean belief in a god or gods, or a supernatural force running the show) are not evidence-based. Once we recognize that, we will also recognize that there is no way to reconcile the two such that there are common grounds for discussion. After all, one group will always be argue using evidence, while the other group will never argue using evidence. A person who is a scientist and has religion must recognize that when they are being religious, they have just left the realms of science. Almost seems like a split personality to me. Cheers, Jim On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 07:57, William Silvert cien...@silvert.org wrote: On another list I recently posted the following, which is relevant to Derek's comment: Should Galileo have been prosecuted?. The philosopher Paul Feyerabend said The Church at the time of Galileo kept much more closely to reason than did Galileo himself, and she took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo's teaching too. Her verdict against Galileo was rational and just. Bill Silvert - Original Message - From: Derek Pursell dep1...@yahoo.com To: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Sent: sábado, 15 de Maio de 2010 1:40 Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] Science and Religion Dogmatic conflict? Re: [ECOLOG-L] evolution for non-scientists textbook Science and religion are indeed compatible, providing that people do not use the ideas and methodologies of one to override or undermine the other... -- James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecology, Evolution and Population Dynamics of Terrestrial Vertebrates -- Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil -- E-mail: jjro...@gmail.com Telefone: 55 41 36730409 Celular: 55 41 98182559 Skype-in (USA):+1 706 5501064 Skype-in (Brazil):+55 41 39415715 -- Ecology and Conservation at the UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Home Page http://jjroper.googlespages.com Ars Artium Consulting http://arsartium.googlespages.com In Google Earth, copy and paste - 25 31'18.14 S, 49 05'32.98 W --
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Science and Religion Dogmatic conflict? Re: [ECOLOG-L] evolution for non-scientists textbook
For those of you who do not think that this debate is divisive, just check out the gubernatorial campaign in Alabama. Both sides are going against evolution to gain supporters! On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 00:18, Warren W. Aney a...@coho.net wrote: How about: Science is trying to discover the world as it is, religion is trying to develop a world as it should become. Warren W. Aney (503) 246-8613 [image: S-CanITeachEvolution.gif] S-CanITeachEvolution.gif
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Ecology Terminology and associated phenomena Colonizing species etc
You do remember that the horses that went extinct in North America are not the same ones that came back with the Spaniards? So, yes, they are introduced. However, horses are not really the issue with introduced species, although they are causing animated debates in the few states that have feral herds. On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 10:16, Randy K Bangert bangr...@isu.edu wrote: Are horses exotic or native if they evolved in North America and then subsequently reintroduced? == Randy Bangert
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Ecology Terminology and associated phenomena Colonizing species etc
Matt has important points. 1. Alien is from somewhere else (that is, it's recent evolutionary history does not include its current location) and natives are from the place where they reside. AFTER that definition, we come to think that aliens are different than residents, and we often find they are (not surprisingly) and are not. Many marine species have unknown historical ranges, so we have no idea where thare are from, and we call those cryptogenic (hidden origins). 2. Whether organisms are bad for being alien is a judgement call, and subjective. Sure, we can say that they cost money, but that only means that they inconvenience us in some way - still subjective. Sure we can say that they change community dynamics, but does the community care? If evolution were allowed to run its course, I am sure that we would all agree than in another million years or so, all the current aliens will have become natives (adapted for where they are, and fitting - in some way - in the community at that time). Thus, the VALUE statements about aliens and invasives are invariably subjective. 3. Politics is about appealing to emotion to justify getting money (and science is often politics). The trend that this breeds is to inflate the value of whatever it is that we want money for. So, how do we justify spending billions on invasive species control? Economically, not scientifically. My objective, scientific reasons for justifying the removal of invasives and alien species are, in fact, subjective. After all, even Elton said it well, although subectively - and I paraphrase - the continued introductions of species will have the net effect of reducing biodiversity, simplifying interactions in nature, and making the world a less interesting place. I can see a future where ecologists study how introduced species have adapted to their adopted homes, how new interactions evolve in communities dominated by introduced species, how biodiversity changes over time with introductions and extinctions. We will have a whole new science of biogeography - rather than Hubbell's Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography we will have someone's Unified Neutral Theory if Biodiversity due to Introductions and Extinctions. I can't help but (subjectively) think that such a place will be much poorer than our natural world of today (and I recognize how much poorer our natural world of today is compared to that of Darwin, for example). Cheers, Jim Matt Chew wrote on 13-May-10 11:59: Under the terminology and definitions promoted by leading invasion biologists including David Richardson and Petr Pyšek, 'alien' species and their subset 'invasive' species are not routinely identified by their ecological characteristics. Aliens are identified by subtracting historical local biotas (meaning species lists) from recent local biotas, then deciding which positive bits of the difference can plausibly be attributed to dispersal via human agency. Invasive species are a subset of aliens: those with the capacity to spread, identified simply by having done so, somewhere.
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Ecology Terminology and associated phenomena Colonizing species etc
James Crants wrote on 11-May-10 13:05: There's a difference between saying that two species are not ecologically equivalent and saying that two categories of species are not ecologically equivalent. But, ecological equivalents are not really equal in such a way that they are substitutable in a community. I mean, you can't just say, take a Clay-colored Robin from Panama and replace the American Robin (even though they might be considered ecological equivalents) and then expect their roles to just fit right in in their new places. If exotic species (as a category) were ecologically equivalent to native ones, you would still find that every species would differ from every other species by at least a few measures. I'm saying that, as a category, exotic species are ecologically different from native ones. Now do you mean until they are naturalized? After all, take the House Sparrow, that has now crossed the continent and invaded many places in the Americas. Is it still ecologically different from natives? I would suggest that if you took both native and introduced species, and did a blind study, in which you looked at survival, interactions and so on, you would not get a clear cut difference in ecological characters that would identify (say, through a discriminant function analysis) introduced and native species. Take the persimmons I have here in my yard here in southern Brazil. Clearly introduced from Japan (I will eliminate them once I have a native fruit tree to replace them with), but they attract leaf-cutter ants to consume leaves, bees and other insects visit the flowers, all kinds of animals eat the fruits, and they seeds are quite viable and the plant could easily become invasive and probably is in many places. If you took a native plant here, like the Scheflera (Didymopanax) and checked it out, you would find that, as a sapling, it cannot handle our cold winters (frost burns every year), it gets hit by aphids so badly that it is often worse than the frost, and the leaf cutter ants also nail it. In the same time my one native sapling has remained at the same size (short, 1 m tall), a persimmon has grown from a seed and is now producing fruit and is about 3 m tall. The Scheflera is at least 9 years old, while the persimmon is about 3. I would suggest that through any objective measurements by a naive observer, they would think that the Scheflera was NOT native and that the Persimmon was. So, my point is, that using objective measurements, I think we would not find that there are clear distrinctions between native and introduced organisms. We may find certain kinds of trends, but the errors associated with using those trends as guides to recognize native or introduced organisms will be large and so not very useful. Cheers, Jim
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Ecology Terminology and associated phenomena Colonizing species etc
Jason, There are few things qualitatively different about any dispersal agent. But, considering the impact and abundance of humans and their dispersal agents these days, there is a quantitative difference. Also, there is a qualitative difference at least in one respect. Dispersal is an evolved trait (at least modified by evolution) while human-mediated dispersal can disperse organisms that did not evolve to be good dispersers. Thus, between the quantitative difference (increased dispersal rates, greater dispersal distances due to humans) and the qualitative difference (dispersal of comparatively poor dispersers due to humans), the combined effects ONLY means a greater rate of introductions, often of species that would never have dispersed by any other means, than ever in the history of the planet. But, besides that, there is no difference between dispersal agents and events. Cheers, Jim Jason Hernandez wrote on 11-May-10 21:48: What, then, is the ecological difference between humans as a dispersal agent, and, say, seabirds as a dispersal agent? When we study Hawaiian native plants, are we not studying how natural selection influenced organisms after their introduction, or as a consequence of the introduction of other species? The system is still one of an organism having been brought to some isolated location to which it could not otherwise have gotten on its own. The whole study of island biodiversity is inherently the study of introductions of alien species by various means, except in the case of continental islands formerly connected to the mainland. Jason Hernandez East Carolina University
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Ecology Terminology and associated phenomena Colonizing species etc
Jim, I hope my (perhaps) subtle tongue in cheek comments about invasives has not confused the issue. I completely agree that human caused introductions are to be avoided at all costs, and active eradication of exotics should be undertaken as a default position until a well-developed argument suggests otherwise. As Elton documented long ago, invasives are problems, both ecologically and financially. States and countries spends billions of dollars each year trying to control many exotics. While I think that we can find examples for both, innocuous exotics and maladapted natives, those examples do not support any position taken on exotics. I would also venture to state that even if statistical tests could not identify an exotic, that does NOT mean the exotic is inconsequential. I think in this case, we should assume guilty until proven innocent. After all, nature took millions of years to come up with what we have today, while we can screw that up in less than a decade. We do not have the information required to decide whether an exotic matters in some philosophical moral sense. We should assume that it is a problem, however, as the best default position - avoid introductions at all costs, eradicate when possible. If we use a moral position, that position can be argued endlessly. If we use a pragmatic position - introductions are uncontrolled experiments and uncontrolled experiments should always be avoided because we cannot know how to predict the outcome (and much less control it) - then until someone can really show how great uncontolled experiments are, no argument will be effective against it. Sincerely, Jim James Crants wrote on 12-May-10 13:02: Jim and others, Your last sentence converges on the point I was trying to make: if you compared native species, as a group, against exotic species, as a group, you would find statistically significant ecological differences (ie, trends), even though you would also find numerous exceptions to those trends. A statistically significant trend is not negated by the existence of outliers, any more than the tendency for men to be taller than women is negated by the fact that many women are taller than many men.
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Ecology Terminology and associated phenomena Colonizing species etc
Good question Martin, But, yes, I would remove all of those from any and all natural settings, and keep them on farms, just like you suggested. As for the animals, they are massive conservation problems in their own rights, so I won't go into why we should all be vegetarian - :-| As you say, keep them from running wild. Which reminds me, have any of you seen those pictures of the record sized boars (domestic pigs) that were shot in Georgia a few years ago? Those are certainly an ecological disaster! Cheers, Jim On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 13:57, Martin Meiss mme...@gmail.com wrote: Really, Mr. Roper (the formality is to avoid confusion between the two Jims)? You would favor removal of such exotics from North America as wheat, apples, oranges, horses, cattle, goats, pigs, and honeybees? Wouldn't you settle for trying to keep them from running wild, rather than eliminating them from farmland because they are exotic? Martin 2010/5/12 James J. Roper jjro...@gmail.com Jim, I hope my (perhaps) subtle tongue in cheek comments about invasives has not confused the issue. I completely agree that human caused introductions are to be avoided at all costs, and active eradication of exotics should be undertaken as a default position until a well-developed argument suggests otherwise. As Elton documented long ago, invasives are problems, both ecologically and financially. States and countries spends billions of dollars each year trying to control many exotics. While I think that we can find examples for both, innocuous exotics and maladapted natives, those examples do not support any position taken on exotics. I would also venture to state that even if statistical tests could not identify an exotic, that does NOT mean the exotic is inconsequential. I think in this case, we should assume guilty until proven innocent. After all, nature took millions of years to come up with what we have today, while we can screw that up in less than a decade. We do not have the information required to decide whether an exotic matters in some philosophical moral sense. We should assume that it is a problem, however, as the best default position - avoid introductions at all costs, eradicate when possible. If we use a moral position, that position can be argued endlessly. If we use a pragmatic position - introductions are uncontrolled experiments and uncontrolled experiments should always be avoided because we cannot know how to predict the outcome (and much less control it) - then until someone can really show how great uncontolled experiments are, no argument will be effective against it. Sincerely, Jim James Crants wrote on 12-May-10 13:02: Jim and others, Your last sentence converges on the point I was trying to make: if you compared native species, as a group, against exotic species, as a group, you would find statistically significant ecological differences (ie, trends), even though you would also find numerous exceptions to those trends. A statistically significant trend is not negated by the existence of outliers, any more than the tendency for men to be taller than women is negated by the fact that many women are taller than many men.
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Ecology Terminology and associated phenomena Colonizing species etc
Jim, you raise a good point (or more) about the kinds of arguments that work. The problem with moral arguments is that they are so nebulous and subjective that they will never defeat a person who just doesn't want to change. I can think of many examples, but none seems to be politically correct to comment on here, so I will leave that up to imagination. I will summarize by saying any moral position can have a contrary moral position that is just as morally valid. However, moral positions are indeed what motivate many people. On the other hand, logical positions (contrasting strongly when the two may not always be at odds) stand on the strength of the logic and can be difficult to refute if one accepts the premises. What we all need to recognize is when we argue, which kind of person are we arguing with - one that will accept our moral stance and agree with us (after all, if they don't, we lost the argument) or one that will accept our premises and yield to logic. The general public often comprises people that mix the two - and they don't recognize when they cross logic and moral boundaries - hence our task is that much more difficult. Cheers, Jim On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 16:28, James Crants jcra...@gmail.com wrote: Jim, Yes, any tongue-in-cheek comments flew right over my head, so I was taking everything in earnest. I should have realized from your earlier references to Elton that you at least recognized exotic invasives as an ecological problem. I think I've sown my own bit of confusion by arguing that exotics are ecologically different from natives. Not only might it not matter, as you suggest, but by phrasing my point in terms of exotics versus natives, I've probably given the impression that I'm just as worked up about wheat, cows, and dandelions as I am about buckthorn, earthworms, and purple loosestrife (to give some examples from my own region, Minnesota, USA). I probably shouldn't be surprised if people think my views on the matter are more rigid and compartmentalized than they really are. You may be right that it is logically better to argue that we shouldn't be conducting unnecessary experiments with unknown outcomes, rather than making moral appeals. Personally, I think both kinds of arguments (rational and moral) are needed. People can be persuaded by reason, but they aren't often strongly motivated by it. We need reason to understand the likely outcomes of different possible courses of action, and appeals to human values to get people to care about those outcomes. With moral arguments alone, though, I agree that the argument just goes on indefinitely, with neither side ever feeling compelled to admit defeat. Unfortunately, the loudest side wins moral debates, and that seems never to be the side I'm on. Jim
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Ecology Terminology and associated phenomena Colonizing species etc
Hi Jim et al., I guess I don't undertand what one would mean by your question, as to whether they behave differently. No two species behave the same in any event, so any given pair of species behaves differently, regardless of origin. Have you read Ricklefs - Disintegration of the ecological community? If the community is more of an accident in space and time rather than a co-evolved bunch of species, then there is no reason to think that any two species behave the same. Let's put it in terms of testable hypotheses. Let's say we have two species, A and B, both are native and we have C, non native. Hypothesis: (A = B) ne C? (where ne is not equal). Clearly A ne B ne C, because, they are all different species. If you can put your idea of behavior being equal in terms of testable hypotheses, I think we could advance. I would also like to see the word matter as in does it matter? placed into a real context, with hypotheses included. I still think the ambiguity of the terms is the reason behind the confusion. Cheers, Jim James Crants wrote on 10-May-10 19:23: Jim, Actually, you answered the question of whether exotic and native species can be distinguished at all, while the question we could not agree on is whether the distinction is ecologically meaningful. Does an exotic species behave differently from a native one? If not, then why should it matter to an ecologist whether a species is native or not? I say exotic species do behave differently, for reasons I gave in my post, and I think it does matter whether a species is native. Dr. Chew (as I understand it) says exotic species do not behave differently, as a group, that the distinction is ecologically meaningless, and that it therefore does not matter whether a species is native. We define native and exotic based on geographic history, and I think he says that that's the only distinction that can objectively be made between the two categories. I would agree with William Silvert that we are getting wrapped up in irrelevant rigor, except that I think important things might hang in the balance here. Invasive species biology loses most of its social relevance if native and exotic species are not ecologically distinguishable. Also, while I agree that we have to accept fuzzy definitions for fuzzy concepts (i.e., most concepts), a tendency emerged in the off-forum discussion to fuzz everything together to the point where humans are just another organism, nothing we do is exceptional, and we have no moral obligation to modify our ecological impact, one way or another, even if doing so is well within our power. That's a matter of using such fuzzy definitions that they cease to be definitions at all, which is different from what Silvert is advocating, but I guess I'm just saying that it's important not to throw out a categorization just because the categories have fuzzy boundaries. Jim Crants On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 4:52 PM, James J. Roper jjro...@gmail.com mailto:jjro...@gmail.com wrote: Ah Jim, But that question is easy to answer. If humans put the species in a place or it arrived in a place that it would not have gotten to on its own, then it is introduced, otherwise it is native or natural. Clearly this is a mere consequence of the short history of humans as dispersal agents on the planet, but it is a good enough definition for 99% of the cases - just check the classic by Elton. We already have the term naturalized which basically means it's here to stay and there is nothing we can do about it. I personally think that for almost all intents and purposes, those definitions work. When they don't work, we are either splitting hairs or don't have clear objectives. I think a clear consequence of this, is that humans should avoid introducing and we should often actively eliminate introductions. But, that idea is based on the premise that we want nature to run its course without human help - but that is not a universally accepted premise. And, a second premise is that evolution by natural selection and how nature may have influenced that through genetic drift, lateral gene transfer or what have you, is what is interesting about nature. I can see a future in which ecologists merely study how natural selection influenced organisms after their introduction, or as a consequence of the introduction of other species. Boring. After all, those will always be on a short term scale and will only illustrate what we probably already know about evolution. The big picture, long term consequence of continental drift, punctuated equilibrium and so on, which have resulted in the fascinating diversity of life, do not occur in one or two human generations - but we can certainly wipe out the evidence of them in the same short time frame. Extinctions and introduced species will do just
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Ecology Terminology and associated phenomena Colonizing species etc
To go straight to the meat of the issue: William Silvert wrote on 11-May-10 11:31: One of the greatest invasions in ecological history occurred when the Mediterranean connected to the Atlantic Ocean. How fundamentally different is that from the opening of the Suez or Panama canals? Well, sure, but trivially so. We are only talking about rates here. And, the fact that we will lose diversity and richness and local history as a consequence of our introductions. But, over geological time, it's just a drop in the bucket. Indeed, your argument, taken to its extreme is, well, since the big bang, all kinds of things have happened and until the big freeze they will continue, so why does it matter what happens in our lifetimes? Clearly we need to define the word matter as in what does it matter. Cheers, Jim
Re: [ECOLOG-L] evolution for non-scientists textbook
The Greatest Show on Earth, by Richard Dawkins. Enjoy. Jim jbowen wrote on 10-May-10 11:01: Hi All: In the fall I am going to be teaching an Evolutionary Biology course for students in the social sciences and humanities. No prior coursework in the natural sciences is required. I am curious if the list might have recommendations for a textbook that is appropriate for this audience. Thanks in advance for your input. -- James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecologia, Evolução e Dinâmicas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil E-mail: jjro...@gmail.com mailto:jjro...@gmail.com Telefone: 55 41 36730409 Celular: 55 41 98182559 Skype-in (USA):+1 706 5501064 Skype-in (Brazil):+55 41 39415715 Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Home Page http://jjroper.googlespages.com Ars Artium Consulting http://arsartium.googlespages.com In Google Earth, copy and paste - 25 31'18.14 S, 49 05'32.98 W
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Ecology Terminology and associated phenomena Colonizing species etc
and impacts and domesticated plants and animals and their cohorts). Since the off-line discussion did not seem to resolve the issue beyond opinions, I am submitting my version of the results for consideration by the Ecolog community. Among the points (you can ignore these, but they give SOME idea of where the discussion wandered) made by various correspondents were: 1. Persistence is an interesting problem, since it requires an arbitrary stipulation. Fitness is demonstrated (or not) generation by generation. 2. . . .why ARE so-called natives of a higher value than so-called exotics? How far back are we supposed to go before something is considered native? 3. . . . humans should learn how the land works, make minimal changes and only necessary ones, and try to adapt to the landscape as best as possible, using history's lessons to create our future. Trying to make zero footprint or impact or change as we live our lives is like trying to swim without getting wet or making ripples. 4. Eventually Albert Thellung split 'aliens' into 7 distinct categories in 1912: ergasiophytes, ergasiolipophytes, ergasiophygophytes, archaeophytes, neophytes, epecophytes, and ephemerophytes; plus two more denoting 'wild' plants growing in modified habitats. Search any of them and they'll pop up in recent central European literature, but they're dead letters in the Anglophone world. 5. Alien and invasive are both relative. The labels are relevant only in areas where new populations have (respectively) appeared, and spread in some discomfiting manner. They provide no information about any biological essence of any species . . . 6. What matters is fitness under prevailing conditions. 7. . . . the whole question of what response to invasive species is morally best is beside the point. 8. For now, I still believe that each of these terms reflects an objective reality, but that each has nebulous boundaries. 9. The danger of separating natural from artificial mentally might be that we think we have to exclude nature wherever we go. The danger of not separating them is that it can help us rationalize an anything-goes approach to natural systems. 10. Have we decided on any definitions, or are there still differences about terminology? Are we ready to list them yet, even if with a multiplicity of definitions? Either way, it looks like we're making entertaining progress in the realm of associated phenomena. Maybe that's the first, if indirect, hurdle in gaining a workable set of terms? 11. My question is, what belongs there, and why? 12. . . . the important thing is to keep the lines of communication open--ESPECIALLY with those who have alien ideas. 13. Once an idea catches on, it's next to impossible to replace it with another one--something like the tenacity of an alien species--or, one might also say with equal validity or spin, that, like the popular pastime of reasoning by analogy, that it is an example of resistance to invasion. 14. I am interested in the question of whether we ought to subsidize the unfit, and suppress the fit. My own summary interpretation of some of the various conclusions are: 1. All organisms move from place to place by some means. 2. Some don't survive in some places. 3. Some survive and reproduce in new places better than some of the organisms that apparently evolved adaptations in accordance with site conditions. 4. Because of various semantic alliances, word meanings and etymology, and interpretations thereof, terms like colonizer, invader, and alien are deemed unsatisfatory to some for the purposes of disciplined enquiry into ecological phenomena. 5. Testable hypotheses seem to be lacking. This is all very incomplete; I hope that contributions from Ecolog subscribers will help to make it more so, if not resolve the issue(s). WT -- James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecologia, Evolução e Dinâmicas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil E-mail: jjro...@gmail.commailto:jjro...@gmail.com Telefone: 55 41 36730409 Celular: 55 41 98182559 Skype-in (USA):+1 706 5501064 Skype-in (Brazil):+55 41 39415715 Ecologia e Conservação na UFPRhttp://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Home Pagehttp://jjroper.googlespages.com Ars Artium Consultinghttp://arsartium.googlespages.com In Google Earth, copy and paste - 25 31'18.14 S, 49 05'32.98 W -- James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecologia, Evolução e Dinâmicas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil E-mail
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Ecology Terminology and associated phenomena Colonizing species etc
to place by some means. 2. Some don't survive in some places. 3. Some survive and reproduce in new places better than some of the organisms that apparently evolved adaptations in accordance with site conditions. 4. Because of various semantic alliances, word meanings and etymology, and interpretations thereof, terms like colonizer, invader, and alien are deemed unsatisfatory to some for the purposes of disciplined enquiry into ecological phenomena. 5. Testable hypotheses seem to be lacking. This is all very incomplete; I hope that contributions from Ecolog subscribers will help to make it more so, if not resolve the issue(s). WT -- James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecologia, Evolução e Dinâmicas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil E-mail: jjro...@gmail.com mailto:jjro...@gmail.com Telefone: 55 41 36730409 Celular: 55 41 98182559 Skype-in (USA):+1 706 5501064 Skype-in (Brazil):+55 41 39415715 Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Home Page http://jjroper.googlespages.com Ars Artium Consulting http://arsartium.googlespages.com In Google Earth, copy and paste - 25 31'18.14 S, 49 05'32.98 W
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Extra-terrestrial Species
I believe Richard Dawkins touched on this topic and I will give my reply giving him credit for his influence. Evolution by natural selection should be a common process in any life form that has inheritence and differential survival and reproduction due to phenotypic variation due to genotypic variation. As a consequence of evolution by natural selection, we would expect species to arise for the same reasons they arise here on earth. The word species should not be conflated with other uses of the word - in biology we all know what we mean, more or less. (humor) - but a chemical species has nothing to do with the biological concept of species. In fact, the word species can also mean any class of objects with something in common, so we don't want that other usage to confuse what we mean when we speak of biological species (not necessarily the biological species concept, what I mean are species that are biological entitites). So, sure, species would be exactly WHAT we call those organisms on other planets. But, of course, it is a moot point - we will never see any. Jim Martin Meiss wrote on 07-May-10 18:46: I think someone is being to bio-centric with the word species. It does not apply only to the living world. Chemists can refer to a molecule as being of a certain chemical species. It seems to me that if the alien beings are not all identical, they must be amenable of classification, which is to say, a taxonomy. If a taxonomy is not to be purely mathematical, their must be taxa, and these taxa must have names. Would we want to come up with a whole new set to replace Kindom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species for each planet with lifeforms? Indeed, perhaps all we need to is add a taxon above kingdom representing the planet of origin, although this could be tricky if a planet had more than one system of life, each without any ancestry in common with the others. Martin M. Meiss 2010/5/7 Shelly Thomassthomas...@hotmail.com Dear Colleagues, This is outside the normal ecological questions we post here, but I am very interested in your opinions on this. I was having an armchair philosophical discussion with a colleague and some students the other day, trying to figure out if we (ecologists / scientists) would use the word species to describe an extra-terrestrial life form (supposing that someday we find one - or one finds us [c.f. Hawking]). Here is why we were unsure of the proper term to use. -The discussion over the basic definition of the word species -We seem to be leaning more toward the phylogenetic definition (although there is much discussion still going on about this and others may disagree); this definition uses the ancestor/lineage model. -If a life form is outside of our planet's big-picture evolutionary lineage, do we then use a different term than species? If so, what might we use? Would love to hear your ideas about this! Thanks, Shelly _ The New Busy is not the old busy. Search, chat and e-mail from your inbox. http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?ocid=PID28326::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WM_HMP:042010_3 -- James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecologia, Evolução e Dinâmicas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil E-mail: jjro...@gmail.com mailto:jjro...@gmail.com Telefone: 55 41 36730409 Celular: 55 41 98182559 Skype-in (USA):+1 706 5501064 Skype-in (Brazil):+55 41 39415715 Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Home Page http://jjroper.googlespages.com Ars Artium Consulting http://arsartium.googlespages.com In Google Earth, copy and paste - 25 31'18.14 S, 49 05'32.98 W
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Question: Is grouping/binning appropriate in regression analysis?
The question really is, why form groups when you already have the two, numerical continuous variables that you want? That is, what is the benefit of grouping? I can think of none. I personally think this is a historical thing that started when computers were unavavailable and it reduced the mathematics to do-able level. Today, the stats works without grouping. Jim On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 09:30, Francisco de Castro decastr...@gmail.comwrote: Hi all, I have a question for the list regarding grouping (binning) of the independent variable in a linear regression. This is routinely done (at least in limnology) in studies involving so-called biomass size-spectra. I'm aware of other (better) methods to fit non-linear models. However, I need to compare my results with older literature where this method is used widely, and I'd like to know first if the method has a problem or if it is outright wrong. My independent variable is mean body size of the individuals of a species (M) and the dependent is either biomass (B, g/m2) or population density (D, indiv/m2) of the species. Body size is lognormally distributed, and the number of species in the sample is ~100. The model to fit is: D= aM^b. First, data are log-transformed in order to apply linear least-squares regression. So the model becomes log(D)= log(a)+ b log(M). The appropriateness of this transformation and possible bias in the estimation of parameters have been discussed before (Zar, Smith, others) so my question in not about that. After log-transforming, sizes are grouped into even-spaced categories, and the densities/biomasses for all sizes within a size group are summed up. So, the independent variable becomes the center of each log-size-bin, and the dependent becomes the sum of all log-densities for each size-bin. Obviously, the number of data gets reduced from the original N to the number of size groups/bins used. After grouping, the log-log model is fitted by least-squares regression. So my questions are: Is this binning of a log-transformed variable statistically appropriate for this problem? Shouldn't be better to use directly the size and density for each species without any grouping? Thanks in advance for any suggestion or literature. Cheers Francisco de Castro Potsdam University
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Are ecologists the problem?
Hello Benjamin, You neglected to note how much reduced land would be needed to feed the people already in existance. That is, the inefficiency of feeding animals that then are fed to people would be eliminated, therefore, much LESS land would be used for crop production than it is today. And, the huge areas devoted to soy beans in Brazil could be eliminated, not augmented. Cheers, Jim Benjamin Lee wrote on 12-Sep-09 21:13: Habitat loss is one of the driving forces of extinctions world wide. This is especially true in places like Brazil. Where the rainforest is being cut down and the water system is polluted by greedy land owners squatters. A big driver in this destruction is soybeans, used to feed domestic animals and PEOPLE (ESP. VEGETARIANS).
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Are humans part of nature?
Bill, First you must define what you mean as part of nature. The trivial definition is that nature is everything, in which case, man is part of nature. On the other hand, if you mean nature as ecological processes, man is not necessarily part of all ecological processes, but then, neither is anything else. I have a feeling that what is meant by man as part of nature is something else, and it is probably ambiguous and will need be defined in practice. Jim William Silvert wrote on 08-Aug-09 13:11: An anthropologist writing on another mailing list wrtoe that ... human beings, and indeed human cultures, have developed as a part of evolutionary processes. This is something that a fair proportion of ecologists do not acknowledge. At my Ph.D. institution, I have had ecologists tell me that humans ARE NOT part of nature! I find this statement remarkable, and would like to know whether it is indeed true that a fair proportion of ecologists feel that humans ARE NOT part of nature. Comments on this would be welcome. Bill Silvert -- P.S. Nunca use acentuação em nomes de arquivos em anexo! James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecologia, Evolução e Dinâmicas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil E-mail: jjro...@gmail.com mailto:jjro...@gmail.com Casa: 55 41 36730409 Skype-in (USA):+1 706 5501064 Skype-in (Brazil):+55 41 39415715 Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Home Page http://jjroper.googlespages.com Ars Artium Consulting http://arsartium.googlespages.com In Google Earth, copy and paste - 25 31'18.14 S, 49 05'32.98 W
Re: [ECOLOG-L] ANOVA - too many treatments
Matheus, Yes, your test was flawed. Remember the assumptions of ANOVA - normal residuals, equality of variances. Two replicates are too few to adequately test the assumption of equality of variance among treatments (and we know nothing of the residual test). If you are unable to test the assumptions of the anova due to small sample size, the anova should not be done. A power of 1 or 0.99 usually means that there was some trivial and self-evident result of your ANOVA, but it can also mean that your data were also insufficient to test power. I have been teaching biostatistics to grad students for several years now. In this class, for every topic the students must find a research paper published in a top journal on the same topic and analyze the analysis. We have found that a very significant portion ( 25%) of the papers analyzed have statistics have flaws that range from minor to major. ALL of these are peer reviewed. Cheers, Jim Matheus Carvalho wrote on 09-Jul-09 20:01: Changing a little the topic, I have a question about the statement of Edwin. He wrote: If the statistics are grossly inappropriate (for example running an ANOVA with 12 treatments, but only 1 or two replicates per treatment), adequate peer review was clearly not in place. Well, I published a paper in which I used 2 way ANOVA with a total of 18 groups and 2 replicates per groups. It was peer reviewed, and one of the reviewers complained about my statistics, asking for measurements of power, perhaps with the expectation that that particular test would have no enough power to draw any conclusions. I used a software to measure the power of the test (G*power 3), and found that power was the maximum possible (1.00) for the effects due to factors 1 and 2, and 0.99 for the interaction effect.Was my test flawed? It was peer reviewed! Best, Matheus C. Carvalho Postdoctoral Fellow Research Center for Environmental Changes Academia Sinica Taipei, Taiwan --- Em qui, 9/7/09, Edwin Cruz-Rivera edwin.cruz-riv...@jsums.edu escreveu: De: Edwin Cruz-Rivera edwin.cruz-riv...@jsums.edu Assunto: Re: [ECOLOG-L] real versus fake peer-reviewed journals Para: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Data: Quinta-feira, 9 de Julho de 2009, 10:37 I believe one of the original questions was how to discern reputable journals from those that publish dubious or biased results...or do not accomplish proper peer review. I can point to a couple of red flags that can be noticed without too much effort and I have observed: 1) If the articles in the journal come mostly from the same institution in which the editor in chief is located, chances are the buddy system has overwhelmed objectivity...especially if the editor is a co-author in most. 2) If orthographic and syntax errors are widespread, probably the review process was not thorough. 3) If the statistics are grossly inappropriate (for example running an ANOVA with 12 treatments, but only 1 or two replicates per treatment), adequate peer review was clearly not in place. Now these may look like extreme cases, but I have seen too many examples similar to the above to wonder how widespread these cases are. I have even received requests to review papers for certain journals in which I have been asked to be more lenient than if I was reviewing for a major journal. This poses a particular dilemma: Is all science not supposed to be measured by the same standards of quality control regardless of whether the journal is institutional, regional, national or international? I would like to think it should be... Edwin -- Dr. Edwin Cruz-Rivera Assist. Prof./Director, Marine Sciences Program Department of Biology Jackson State University JSU Box18540 Jackson, MS 39217 Tel: (601) 979-3461 Fax: (601) 979-5853 Email: edwin.cruz-riv...@jsums.edu It is not the same to hear the devil as it is to see him coming your way (Puerto Rican proverb) Veja quais são os assuntos do momento no Yahoo! +Buscados http://br.maisbuscados.yahoo.com
Re: [ECOLOG-L] citation manager
Just curious José, But, in bibsonomy, can a writer build their literature cited section of a paper? In Zotero, I can insert codes within my document and when finished writing the document, Zotero will then build the entire lit cited section. Zotero also has tools for sharing your bibliography list. What do you find that is clumsy in Zotero? Jim José Gómez-Dans wrote on 16-Jun-09 6:21: Hi, On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 9:33 PM, Cochran-Stafira, D. Liane coch...@sxu.eduwrote: Please tell me I'm not crazy. I seem to remember someone describing a free ware beta-version program similar to Reference Manager etc. during the last few weeks. I have tried to search the archives, but I'm not having any luck. Could someone forward a copy of that email to me offline? Thanks. In the thread, I have seen no mention of http://bibsonomy.org, a web-based reference manager. I think it scores above Zotero in the fact that I can very easily share references with colleagues. Think of it as a del.icio.usbut for references. It understands many academic journals' sites. I find it far far less clumsy than zotero. My 2p ;D Jose -- James J. Roper Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Bocas del Toro Marine Research Station MRC 0580-03 Unit 9100, Box 0948 DPO AA 34002-9998 Skype-in (USA):+1 706 5501064 Skype-in (Brazil):+55 41 39415715 E-mail - personal: jjro...@gmail.com E-mail - consulting: arsart...@gmail.com STRI Bocas del Toro http://www.stri.org/english/research/facilities/marine/bocas_del_toro/index.php Programa de Pós-graduação em Ecologia e Conservação http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Educational Pages http://jjroper.googlepages.com/ Ars Artium Consulting http://arsartium.googlepages.com/ 9^o 21.122' N, and 82^o 15.390' W In Google Earth, copy and paste - 9 21.122' N, 82 15.390' W
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Different results from Statview and SPSS
I believe that in SPSS and SAS (JMP is an offshoot of SAS, so probably has similar mathematical underpinnings), you can choose the types of sum of squares that you want. If you do not specifically state which you want, they may have different defaults. Hence the different results. You can go into the help and find out the default and as long as you know which you want, you can then force them to do the one you want. Cheers, Jim MaryBeth Voltura wrote on 09-Jun-09 21:09: I am reviewing an old dataset that I had originally analyzed in Statview (5.0.1), and re-ran some statistics in SPSS (v.16.0), with very different results. I am running ANOVA on food intake, using body mass as a covariate, with 3 experimental diet groups. The two programs produce different sums of squares and utilize different degrees of freedom for the independent variables, thus producing very different p-values. Has anyone working with these two programs run into anything similar? BTW, if I run the ANOVA with no covariate, the sum of squares and F-statistic and p-values match up between Statview and SPSS. Any ideas? ~~ Mary Beth Voltura, Assistant Professor Department of Biological Sciences SUNY Cortland Cortland NY 13045 607-753-2713 marybeth.volt...@cortland.edu -- James J. Roper Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Bocas del Toro Marine Research Station MRC 0580-03 Unit 9100, Box 0948 DPO AA 34002-9998 Skype-in (USA):+1 706 5501064 Skype-in (Brazil):+55 41 39415715 E-mail - personal: jjro...@gmail.com E-mail - consulting: arsart...@gmail.com STRI Bocas del Toro http://www.stri.org/english/research/facilities/marine/bocas_del_toro/index.php Programa de Pós-graduação em Ecologia e Conservação http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Educational Pages http://jjroper.googlepages.com/ Ars Artium Consulting http://arsartium.googlepages.com/ 9^o 21.122' N, and 82^o 15.390' W In Google Earth, copy and paste - 9 21.122' N, 82 15.390' W
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Plagiarizing methods...
Interesting can of worms Cara. The logical extension of this is that every time someone says that they are using a regression, Anova, correlation and so on, they should cite the person who wrote the original mathematics behind them. But, I have seen written in statistical packages that the mathematics are considered standard and so do NOT necessarily need to be cited. I would think that the first paper on PCR could be cited as follows: PCR followed standard procedures (citation) at the following temperature and times (list temperatures and times). It just doesn't matter that all are similar, because now we might be able to call the procedure public domain information. Possibly we no longer need to cite the original either, if public domain. At any rate, this brings up another issue. I have revised papers in English in which the introduction was very poorly written, the methods and some of the results were much better, often in idiomatic English (that a foreigner would not know) and then the discussion again was poorly written. Clearly the authors cut and pasted the methods, modifying the details. Is that really a problem? Well, if methods are standard operating procedures, it is like a recipe and recipes can and should be repeated as uniformly as possible. How do we decide what is recipe and what is not? Is recipe plagiarism? One would hope not. Cheers, Jim On Sat, Jun 6, 2009 at 03:50, Cara Lin Bridgman cara@msa.hinet.netwrote: Hi Jim, Actually, this 'encouragement' can be much more subtle. It's when their advisor looks up at them, sighs, and says Can't you do better? Since they can't do better without taking a few more years of English writing classes, they copy. In Taiwan, at any rate, scientists are now being blacklisted from Taiwan's National Science Council funding for various ethical problems, including plagiarism. So, understanding of the problem has improved, but the ability to solve the problem is still lagging behind. I tell my students they are all English Handicapped, which means throughout their career they will need extra time, effort, and money to write scientific papers. This is a burden added to the problem we discussed last month: gaining access to published papers. CL James Crants wrote: Cara Lin, I was trying to craft a good response to your questions, but I think I should leave it to people with more experience publishing and editing than I have. I'll just mention that the issue of Science I just received yesterday has an article about blatant plagiarism in scientific papers and some of the tools people use to detect it. Unfortunately, it sounds like some Chinese scientists are being encouraged by their local writing experts to copy papers on work similar to their own, changing the details to fit their own research and results. The rationale is that this allows them to present their original research in far better English than they could manage if they were writing from scratch. I can certainly sympathize with concerns about writing intelligently in a foreign language, but it's really a shame that there are scientists being told to produce papers in a way that will put a big black mark on their international repuations. ~~ Cara Lin Bridgman cara@msa.hinet.net P.O. Box 013 Shinjhuang http://megaview.com.tw/~caralinhttp://megaview.com.tw/%7Ecaralin Longjing Township http://www.BugDorm.com Taichung County 43499 TaiwanPhone: 886-4-2632-5484 ~~ -- James J. Roper Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Bocas del Toro Marine Research Station MRC 0580-03 Unit 9100, Box 0948 DPO AA 34002-9998 Skype-in (USA):+1 706 5501064 Skype-in (Brazil): 41 39415715 E-mail - personal: jjro...@gmail.com E-mail - consulting: arsart...@gmail.com STRI Bocas del Torohttp://www.stri.org/english/research/facilities/marine/bocas_del_toro/index.php Programa de Pós-graduação em Ecologia e Conservaçãohttp://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Educational Pages http://jjroper.googlepages.com/ Ars Artium Consulting http://arsartium.googlepages.com/ 9o21.122' N, and 82o15.390' W In Google Earth, copy and paste - 9 21.122' N, 82 15.390' W --
Re: [ECOLOG-L] THE COST OF PUBLISHING RE: [ECOLOG-L] Open Access and Intellectual Imperialism
Hello all, I have been translating papers from Portuguese and Spanish, and fixing the English in papers already translated, for around 10 years now. As a biologist, I can usually figure out what the person wished to say in English and how to say it reasonably well. However, I have seen that when translated or reviewed by an English speaker who is NOT a biologist, or a non-native English speaker who speaks English very well, the translations often end up very poorly written. Also, translations are often done by computer and the original author often may not have the ability to recognize poorly written English and all these cause issues with the paper after it is submitted. At the same time, reviewers often seem disinclined to allow for what we might call an accent in the English. I have seen papers with minimal accent that often came after a translation when the original author thought that one or two sentences needed revision, and did so without consulting the translator. Those few sentences caught the eye of the reviewer who then gave a blanket recommendation to review the ENTIRE English. Perhaps reviewers need to be a little more flexible as well. Jim Hamazaki, Hamachan (DFG) wrote on 19-May-09 3:33: One snag with this is the language barrier for those writing papers in their second or third language: English. I agree with Cara. I always submit manuscript after being edited by my native English speaker co-workers and a professional editor. Even after those editing, journal reviewers often put low on Readability Criteria, such as * Interest: Captures and holds readers' attention. * Understandable: Uses easy-to-understand language and flows smoothly. * Development: Appropriately sequences and constructs paragraphs and sentences to support the central idea and conclusions. * Mechanics: Uses acceptable standards of spelling and grammar. In my experience, most of my Native English speaking coworkers can correct simple spelling and grammar errors. However, most of them can't correct language flow smoothly, except for them rewriting the entire manuscript, which they would not do. Toshihide Hamachan Hamazaki, PhD : 濱崎俊秀：浜ちゃん Alaska Department of Fish Game Division of Commercial Fisheries 333 Raspberry Rd. Anchorage, Alaska 99518 Ph: 907-267-2158 Fax: 907-267-2442 Cell: 907-440-9934 E-mail: toshihide.hamaz...@alaska.gov CL wrote: One snag with this is the language barrier for those writing papers in their second or third language: English. I'm working hard to get my Taiwanese students to attend and follow directions, but it is an uphill battle. Some authors are just going to need some help. CL malcolm McCallum wrote: we are working to shift most of the formatting to the authors, but this requires VERY GOOD directions! ~~ Cara Lin Bridgman cara@msa.hinet.net P.O. Box 013 Shinjhuang http://megaview.com.tw/~caralin Longjing Township http://www.BugDorm.com Taichung County 43499 TaiwanPhone: 886-4-2632-5484 ~~ -- James J. Roper Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Bocas del Toro Marine Research Station MRC 0580-03 Unit 9100, Box 0948 DPO AA 34002-9998 Skype-in (USA):+1 706 5501064 Skype-in (Brazil):+55 41 39415715 E-mail - personal: jjro...@gmail.com E-mail - consulting: arsart...@gmail.com STRI Bocas del Toro http://www.stri.org/english/research/facilities/marine/bocas_del_toro/index.php Programa de Po's-graduac,a~o em Ecologia e Conservac,a~o http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Educational Pages http://jjroper.googlepages.com/ Ars Artium Consulting http://arsartium.googlepages.com/ 9^o 21.122' N, and 82^o 15.390' W In Google Earth, copy and paste - 9 21.122' N, 82 15.390' W
Re: [ECOLOG-L] analyzing ordinal phenology data
John, Basically you are doing a ranked regression analysis. I believe you can find a paper on that from several years ago. It works, but you just cannot make inferences based on the regression line. That is, you can't find a phenology rate due to the regression, but you can still talk about direction and effect. One goal of regression is to decide cause and effect of some predicted trend. You may do that with rank regression - that is, reject the null hypothesis of independence between your independent and dependent variables. Cheers, Jim John Skillman wrote: Ecologgers... We have regularly censused populations of several different plant species throughout the growing season and categorized the observed individuals into one of 7 different phenological stages (e.g., stage 1 = initial greening, stage 4 = peak flowering, stage 6 = seed drop, etc.). These numeral IDs for the different stages are ordinal data that, by coincidence, tend to scale linearly with day of the growing season. Although using ordinal data is not permitted (and makes no sense) in regression analyses, we've done it anyway! By running regressions we are able to get slopes (change in phenological stage vs. day of year) which, in essence, quantifies the seasonal rates of development for the different species. Taking it one step further, Analyses of Covariance confirm that some species progress through these phenological stages at rates that are significantly different from that of other species. So if this tells me what I want to know, what is the problem? The problem, of course, is that this approach treats these phenological stage IDs (1-7) as quantitative values when, in fact, they are nothing more than category labels. Can anyone suggest an alternative way to use these data to quantify seasonal development rates and test for differences among species? BTW, we censused different individuals within each population haphazardly (~10 individuals per population per census date) and did NOT follow the same individuals over the season. John Skillman -- James J. Roper Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Bocas del Toro Marine Research Station MRC 0580-03 Unit 9100, Box 0948 DPO AA 34002-9998 Skype-in (USA):+1 706 5501064 Skype-in (Brazil): 41 39415715 E-mail - personal: jjro...@gmail.com E-mail - consulting: arsart...@gmail.com STRI Bocas del Toro http://www.stri.org/english/research/facilities/marine/bocas_del_toro/index.php Programa de Pós-graduação em Ecologia e Conservação http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Educational Pages http://jjroper.googlepages.com/ Ars Artium Consulting http://arsartium.googlepages.com/ 9^o 21.122' N, and 82^o 15.390' W In Google Earth, copy and paste - 9 21.122' N, 82 15.390' W
Re: [ECOLOG-L] CLIMATE Change Anthropogenic Belief and Evidence Re: [ECOLOG-L] Reference for % of scientists that think climate change is caused by humans?
Wayne, You ware wanting the kind of data that nobody has really had the chance to gather yet. Have you seen Stuart Pimm's book, The World According to Pimm? That would be a very good start. But, you are talking about data on a global scale - almost no research has been funded on that large a scale, long enough to actually bring together so much. So, there are data from a lot of disparate sources, and logic (the logic of how CO2, and other gases, work as a greenhouse gas, for example). Also, there is some hubris in thinking that we can actually fine tune something that is so large, when we can't even predict the weather a week in advance. Hence the problem with having a data supported and fully referenced study. Jim Wayne Tyson wrote on 30-Mar-09 20:56: Ecolog: Can anyone refer me to data-supported and fully-referenced studies (rather than opinions) that define the balance (percent, ratio) of direct and indirect anthropogenic and non-human sources/causes of the various climate-changing factors (listed) together with mitigating factors and how they influence trends in climate change in terms of fluctuations and long-term trends of what might be called greenhouse and nuclear winter consequences? Such studies should be clearly enough presented that anyone, scientist or non-scientist, should be able to understand the conclusions and their foundations at any level and be able to follow the logic back through the analysis to the raw data. While I am influenced by what percent of scientists believe, I am only provisionally influence by such broad numbers and tend to be more impressed by qualitative than quantitative assessments (WHICH scientists, and their credibility) of that kind. Still, I am far more interested in the hard science and its scholarly but clear presentation, together with all the relevant ifs, ands, and buts than I am in a rather confusing tangle of claims. WT PS: As a matter of common sense, we non-experts can kinda get it that human activity causes all kinds of damage to all kinds of systems, including the climate system. But we get real confused because of the scale and complexity of the relevant factors and the dynamic nature of systems and the potential for shifts in trends. We also can kinda get it that the anthropogenic part is BIG, but we have trouble getting a handle on how big in comparison to all the other climate-change factors and modulating effects and processes. Finally, we've been misled so much that we are suspicious of band wagons and fads as a genre. We realize that those who challenge the dominant view can be hucksters and cranks, but we also seem to remember that The Authorities have often turned out to be wrong throughout history and that challengers tend to get burned at the stake. - Original Message - From: Jeremy Claisse jclai...@yahoo.com To: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Sent: Monday, February 16, 2009 10:50 PM Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] Reference for % of scientists that think climate change is caused by humans? Turns out there a several good references listed on wikipedia under global warming controversy. Thank you to those who already responded. -Original Message- From: Ecological Society of America: grants, jobs, news on behalf of Jeremy Claisse Sent: Mon 2/16/2009 7:53 PM To: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Subject: [ECOLOG-L] Reference for % of scientists that think climate change is caused by humans? My brother (who works in marketing) recently sent me the e-mail below. I don't intend this to turn into a discussion of the general public's understanding of uncertainty in science, I am just wondering if anyone is aware of a study that looked at the percentage of scientists that think climate change is caused primarily by anthropogenic factors vs. entirely a natural cycle. Thanks. No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 8.0.237 / Virus Database: 270.10.25/1955 - Release Date: 02/16/09 06:55:00 -- James J. Roper Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Bocas del Toro Marine Research Station MRC 0580-03 Unit 9100, Box 0948 DPO AA 34002-9998 Skype-in (USA):+1 706 5501064 Skype-in (Brazil): 41 39415715 E-mail - personal: jjro...@gmail.com E-mail - consulting: arsart...@gmail.com STRI Bocas del Toro http://www.stri.org/english/research/facilities/marine/bocas_del_toro/index.php Programa de Pós-graduação em Ecologia e Conservação http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Educational Pages http://jjroper.googlepages.com/ Ars Artium Consulting http://arsartium.googlepages.com/ 9^o 21.122' N, and 82^o 15.390' W In Google Earth, copy and paste - 9 21.122' N, 82 15.390' W
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Two simple solutions for global warming
Stephen, For your first idea to work would require separating the oxygen from the carbon dioxide - that would require the input of a lot of energy that would then put more CO2 into the atmosphere. For your second idea to work, O2 would have to be a greenhouse gas, which it is not. While you may not mind if the oil industry did fund your research, I think that after they read your email with suggestions, they will decide that they don't mind not supporting you either. Unfortunately, it was difficult to tell in your email if you were joking...so I assume you were. Cheers, Jim On 24/Oct/08 09:22, Stephen Hale wrote: I want to say at the outset that I'm not one of those skeptics who don't believe in global warming. I believe it's happening and it's scary. I'm proposing two solutions based on chemistry and mathematics.
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Biological requirements and matching environments. Re: [ECOLOG-L] Salix success? Success of exotics?
In Brazil, honeysuckle, pine trees, mulberry, several Asian trees whose English names I cannot remember (if I ever knew) are all pests, and there is an herbaceous plants, smells like honeysuckle, that is from Madagascar, that is now naturalized throughout tropical America. Okay, those are some old world and northern American pests in tropical America. On the other hand, Brazilian pepper along with many many other American plants are pests elsewhere, including Australia, New Zealand, Africa, Asia and Europe. It is a two way street. But, I highly recommend you go back to Elton, the classic book, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants, written in 1958 to see all kinds of examples and some good thinking about the causes and consequences! Jim On 24/Aug/08 19:20, Wayne wrote: All: Within their genetic limits, when environments present closely-matching characteristics within those limits, organisms will tend to thrive; to the extent that the match is not close, they will not thrive as much or will be extirpated.* I hope you all will help create as simple a statement as possible by modifying or replacing this one. I am trying to distill the principles of ecology into the simplest possible statements. WT *I believe that this statement ultimately answers all of Patton's questions, but I am interersted in hearing others. - Original Message - From: Geoffrey Patton [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2008 5:19 AM Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] Salix success? Success of exotics? Why do so many exotics species become alien pests? We are all aware of the explanation for that success being the lack of predatory species. Is this all there is to the story? Could their longer evolution in their homeland have given them genetic advantages? Do as many New World species become invasive exotics in the Old World? Geoff Patton --- On Sat, 8/23/08, David Inouye [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: David Inouye [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [ECOLOG-L] Salix success? To: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Date: Saturday, August 23, 2008, 11:20 PM What makes Salix (willows) so successful at high latitudes and high altitudes? Unusual physiological traits? -- James J. Roper Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Bocas del Toro Marine Research Station Unit 0948 APO AA 34002 Skype-in (USA):+1 706 5501064 Skype-in (Brazil): 41 39415715 E-mail - personal: [EMAIL PROTECTED] E-mail - consulting: [EMAIL PROTECTED] STRI Bocas del Toro http://www.stri.org/english/research/facilities/marine/bocas_del_toro/index.php Programa de Pós-graduação em Ecologia e Conservação http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Educational Pages http://jjroper.googlepages.com/ Ars Artium Consulting http://arsartium.googlepages.com/ 9^o 21.122' N, and 82^o 15.390' W In Google Earth, copy and paste - 9 21.122' S, 82 15.390' W
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Open access versus traditional publication models
For people in the third world, there is a strong tendency to favor open access. Why? Because it is economically viable. The cost of purchasing articles is prohibitive for many researchers and so they would prefer to be able to publish AND read open access articles. And, of course, there are now many, and the number is growing, very good scientists in tropical countries, and since their research is tropical for the most part, I think we will see a gradual trend in these researchers to publish in open access journals, which will little by little increase the quality of those journals. As they become better, they will get more submittals and the cycle will go on. If first world journals actually recognized the economics for Third World researchers, and did some conversion that made them as easy to purchase for a third world scientist as for a first world scientist, it would make a big difference. But, just go online and try to buy an article - they make no distinction for currency. So, a $25 article for you, is also that for me, only $25 for me is the equivalent of $40 or so. Imagine subscribing to Science or any other high end journal - also prohibitively expensive for most. Even universities down here often do not have the money for an institutional subscription. Thus, Third World research might just go the way of open access, while first world stays in typical journals, causing another First World - Third World separation. Cheers, Jim On 27/Mar/08 16:42, Andrew Rypel wrote: Dear Ecologers, I'd like to probe the forum on people's opinion of the publication models available to scientists today. I (and probably most of us) have seen a massive rise in the number of open access publications over just the last 2-3 years. And yet this seems to be happening alongside an explosion in the number of traditional-style publications as well. What does this all mean for us ecologists trying to get our studies read by as many people as possible and by those that can take your information and make a difference with it – either through further research or policy? I'll be honest that I'm leery of many of the new open access journals. I do see value in them, especially for those who are at underfunded research centers that don't have access to many of the mainstream publications. On the other hand, what are they? Do they ultimately reach as many people? And do they reach the right people – the ones that control aspects of policy or have top-tier research programs. Are these new journals to be indexed in Web of Science or the other academic search engines? So many questions surround this new format and I just wonder what the rest of the community thinks. Andrew -- James J. Roper, Ph.D. James J. Roper Ecologia, Evolução e Dinâmicas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Telefone: 55 41 33857249 celular: 55 41 99870543 Skype-in (USA):+1 706 5501064 Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Home Page http://jjroper.googlespages.com Ars Artium Consulting http://arsartium.googlespages.com
Research and job opportunities
Dear all, I see many notices for undergrad or grad job, research and internship=20 opportunities. I would like to suggest to all of you placing notices=20 that you ALWAYS add one additional piece of information. This=20 information is whether the job is open to non-United States citizens. I = have students and am often in communication with Latin American students = from countries besides Brazil, and often these opportunities look=20 fantastic for someone from down south. However, the students usually=20 assume that they are not eligible. These opportunities would indeed be=20 fantastic for Latin American students, who would greatly benefit from=20 both, the educational experience, and the small stipend! Sincerely, Jim --=20 James J. Roper, Ph.D. James J. Roper Ecologia e Din=E2micas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paran=E1, Brasil E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Telefone: 55 41 33857249 celular: 55 41 99870543 Ecologia e Conserva=E7=E3o na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Econci=EAncia - Consultoria e Tradu=E7=F5es http://jjroper.googlespages.= com
Re: Data set with many many zeros..... Help?
Warren, and Bill, et al., I have also been intrigued by the kinds of replies. I took a completely different approach and would like to see what people think. First, of course, we should know what the question is. But, I assumed that, considering the data, the question had to do with where the organism occurred, and with its abundance. Those are two very different questions. I suggested that presence/absence will answer the WHERE question, but may not answer the ABUNDANCE question. After all, information about where something is may often NOT be found where something is NOT. So, I recommended using the presence - absence in one analysis, and where the organism existed in the abundance analysis. Also, I was taught to have the analysis planned prior to data collection as well. Cheers, Jim Warren W. Aney said the following on 14/Jan/08 01:11: Bill, are we the Luddites in this arena? I agree with you, and my statistics professor would have taken it one important step further: Choose your statistical analysis methods before you start collecting your data -- that way you can carry out your data collection so as to fit your chosen statistical procedure. Too many people collect their data first, then search for a statistical procedure that will fit their data. The best time to seek the advice of a statistician is before you design your study, not after you've collected your data. Warren W. Aney Senior Wildlife Ecologist Tigard, Oregon -Original Message- From: Ecological Society of America: grants, jobs, news [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of William Silvert Sent: Sunday, January 13, 2008 1:57 PM To: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Subject: Re: Data set with many many zeros. Help? One point about the various replies to this and other posts that disturbs me is the focus of the responses. It used to be that statistical questions were answered in terms of statistical techniques, such as regression or ANOVA or t-tests. Now the answers are phrased in terms of software - SAS, R, SysStat, etc. I am not confident that relying on proprietary black boxes is the best way to analyse data. Bill Silvert - Original Message - If you have access to SAS, ... -- James J. Roper, Ph.D. James J. Roper Ecologia, Evolução e Dinâmicas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Telefone: 55 41 33857249 celular: 55 41 99870543 Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Home Page http://jjroper.googlespages.com Ars Artium Consulting http://arsartium.googlespages.com
Re: ecological footprint, 3rd world vs. 1st world
Kelly says: when it comes to pollution caps, environmental controls, waste water treatment facilities, and the skills, education and abilities to take care of our resources. While this MAY be true, there is still the matter of numbers. If 300 million people, for instance, scattered widely over a large area consume and throw away much more per capita than fewer people more concentrated in a smaller area, then while there may be laws that wok in the first option, their impact can still be greater than that in the third world (per capita). And don't forget, much of the Third World is third because of the first world exploitation. So, you can find directional causal links from First World riches to Third World squalor (where it exists - here in Brazil there is probably not much more squalor than in the USA) or poverty, but you can certainly not blame the poor in the Third World for the riches in the first! Jim -- James J. Roper, Ph.D. James J. Roper Ecologia e Dinâmicas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Telefone: 55 41 33857249 celular: 55 41 99870543 Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Econciência - Consultoria e Traduções http://jjroper.googlespages.com
Re: population control
Cl is correct in this. We also must recognize that indeed the biggest problems are NOT from Third World countries, contrary to popular belief - it is OUR problem, not somebody else's. For example, as mentioned, Brazil has 100 million FEWER people on the same amount of land as the USA - gross figures. BUT, those people are actually MUCH more urban than rural, so there is much more still natural land in Brazil than just looking at those numbers. But, of the land being damaged, what of those causes? Globalization. Soy, that goes to China and the USA and Europe. The huge populations in those countries DRIVE the problems in the third world, because the economics revolves around the rich folks. Soy production in Brazil is on a much greater scale than small farmers who cut the forest to eke out a living. In Africa and parts of Asia, where populations are larger, perhaps cutting for firewood is a big problem, but in other parts logging to feed the Japanese and Chinese markets are more important. So, no matter how you look at it, the conservation problems follow the money. So, the solution is to follow the money to the source of the problem. Jim Cara Lin Bridgman wrote: The thing that bothers me about most of these sorts of humans vs environment discussions is how the focus tends to be on population--as if we could just solve the problem of third world population growth, then everything would be hunky-dory. It tends to turn our biggest environmental problems into 'somebody else's problem.' CL Please note my new-old email address: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~~ Cara Lin Bridgman P.O. Box 013 Phone: 886-4-2632-5484 Longjing Sinjhuang Taichung County 434 Taiwanhttp://megaview.com.tw/~caralin/ ~~ -- James J. Roper, Ph.D. James J. Roper Ecologia e Dinâmicas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Telefone: 55 41 33857249 celular: 55 41 99870543 Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Econciência - Consultoria e Traduções http://jjroper.googlespages.com
Re: population control
Osmar, I read about how the quiz was made and it admits that it is less accurate for Third World countries, in part for reasons similar to the ones you stated. Clearly, very accurate data are hard to come by. But, if you are poor in S=E3o Paulo, you have a much smaller imprint than if you were poor = in New York! But, nonetheless, the idea is a good one and when judiciously used and considered, it does open eyes to problems. Try a little test - pretend you live with your same standard of living, but choose a place in the United States, Italy or England. Compare the results. Cheers, Jim On Dec 1, 2007 12:57 PM, Osmar Luiz Jr [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I just wondered what kind of people developed this ecological footprint quiz, because for me its seen biased and flawed. Na=EFve, at best. You said that first world kids will have larger footprints that third world kids. Because poor third world kids don't travel by planes, they walk by feet because his parents don't have a car, share it houses with many of people and doesn't eat meat or industrialized food because don't have money for buy it. But I've not seen in that quiz questions about if the shanty town you live was built over a former pristine rainforest bush, how many trees must be down to build your wooden house and what the oxygen dissolved rate in the water of that river which you and your family deject your feces. This certalinly will improve the footprint of the poor third world kids. You should make all the questions. That `footprint quiz` could made firs= t world people feels guilt. But again your eco-attitudes will be useless an= d short-reached if population in the tropics still rises at the rates they are. Osmar - Original Message - From: Cara Lin Bridgman [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Sent: Friday, November 30, 2007 2:29 PM Subject: Re: population control Idiocracy, then, gets back to the 1920's and 1930's ideas of eugenics and 'propagation of the fit' (lampooned by Dorothy Sayers in her book Gaudy Night): educated people must reproduce to make sure we still hav= e smart people on the planet--as if all the poor people were stupid. So far, I've really only see one or two comments on the relative weights of ecological footprints between those in first world countries deciding not to have kids and those in third world countries having lots of kids. Most any bunch of third world kids will have a whole lot smaller ecological footprint than most any first world kid or non-child-bearin= g first-world adult. A year or so ago, here on Ecolog, this point was raised. First world ecological footprints are huge compared to third world ones--even with 'only one' long-haul flight a year (that one flight adds a whole planet to an ecological footprint: www.myfootprint.org). So, the third world may be making most of the babies, but it is the first (and second) world that is doing most of the consumption and is the driving force behind most ecological disasters from mountain top removal for coal to logging for living room furniture to wars for oil. The arguments about having kids to maintain social security are not an= y different from the arguments about having kids to take care of you in your old age. In the third world, kids ARE social security. The poin= t I've always wondered about is this: what sort of social security will these kids have? CL Please note my new-old email address: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~~ Cara Lin Bridgman P.O. Box 013 Phone: 886-4-2632-5484 Longjing Sinjhuang Taichung County 434 Taiwanhttp://megaview.com.tw/~caralin/http://megaview= .com.tw/%7Ecaralin/ ~~ Esta mensagem foi verificada pelo E-mail Protegido Terra. Scan engine: McAfee VirusScan / Atualizado em 30/11/2007 / Vers=E3o: 5.1.00/5175 Proteja o seu e-mail Terra: http://mail.terra.com.br/ -- No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.503 / Virus Database: 269.16.12/1162 - Release Date: 30/11/2007 21:26 --=20 James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecologia e Din=E2micas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paran=E1, Brasil E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Telefone: 55 41 33857249 Mobile: 55 41 99870543 http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Ecologia e Conserva=E7=E3o na UFPR http://jjroper.googlespages.com Personal Pages
Re: ECOLOG-L Digest - 28 Nov 2007 to 29 Nov 2007 (#2007-322)
Funny how the word selfish gets tossed around with nobody defining their position. People with kids think those without are selfish, and vice versa= . Niether has a good claim because the term is so nebulous. For example, having kids increases inclusive fitness - selfish having kids could help the planet in the future if they turn into good, decent and concerned world citizens (big if) - unselfish not having kids helps the planet - unselfish not having kids avoids the need to raise other human beings, spending time and money in the process - selfish not having kids avoids the need to raise other human beings, spending time and money in the process - unselfish, because all that time and money and growth just generates more waste that is destroying life as we know it. See, just depends on how you define your terms. Jim On Nov 30, 2007 1:51 PM, joseph gathman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Michele Scardi wrote: although I certainly respect people who don't want to have children on an individual basis, I can't help but thinking that they're a tad selfish as an opinion group. That's an interesting statement, considering that I've always thought that having children is just about the most selfish thing anybody could do... Joe = Get easy, one-click access to your favorites. Make Yahoo! your homepage. http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs --=20 James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecologia e Din=E2micas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paran=E1, Brasil E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Telefone: 55 41 33857249 Mobile: 55 41 99870543 http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Ecologia e Conserva=E7=E3o na UFPR http://jjroper.googlespages.com Personal Pages
Re: Population control
Another N-S perspective. We should pay attention to numbers - for example, excluding Alaska, the US and Brazil are about the same area. The USA has 100 MILLION people MORE than Brazil in that same area Density is much greater in Europe, clearly India and China. Many Third World countries figure that the USA became great by populating itself and so they need to d= o the same. During the 1800s in the USA it has been figured that the average family had around 8 kids (if my memory serves). So, yes, the world is overpopulated, but who should be reducing their populations? Cheers, Jim On 11/29/07, Amartya Saha [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Oh well. Here's that old north vs south debate again. Yes, things would b= e extreme if all 500 million individuals had the resource usage of the firs= t world. As regards the lady who decided to be childless, its her trip and no one has any business passing judgements on that. But if she were indeed serious about reducing her carbon footprint, she'd reduce much more if she left cushy London and went and lived in a third world town. Better, a third world farm. Tha= t includes giving up long haul flights once a year... cheers amartya Quoting Lela Stanley [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Matheus does raise a point that is rarely discussed even here and virtually never by (American) politicos. The human footprint would still be problematic with a smaller global population, but it would be made vastly more bearable if we weren't multipying quite so fruitfully. I've seen estimates (possibly in The World Without Us?) of a global human carryin= g capacity at 500 million to 1 billion individuals- numbers which are unlikely to be reached through even the most heartfelt birth control campaigns. All the same, between a thoughtful, systematic reduction of population - including measures such as, yes, some people not having kids - and a grand Malthusian crash, I know which I'd vote for. On 11/28/07, Mike Marsh [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: All of the people who believed that they could help to save the plane= t by not having babies lived their life span and died. The rest of the world's population went ahead and had babies. As the genetic (and cultural) lines of those believers in birth control perished, the human population grew even faster. Mike Marsh - Matheus Carvalho wrote: ... to reduce her CO2 footprint. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id= =3D495495in_page_id=3D1879 --=20 James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecologia e Din=E2micas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paran=E1, Brasil E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Telefone: 55 41 33857249 Mobile: 55 41 99870543 http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Ecologia e Conserva=E7=E3o na UFPR http://jjroper.googlespages.com Personal Pages
Re: unoccupied niches and 'competitive exclusion
Niches are best defined by the species - after all, what each species does= is its niche Imagine a planet with no animals, but with plants. There are no animal niches... But, if we want to use the idea of potential for use, in which case we woul= d probably be talking about complexity in some sense, then why not just use the word complexity? After all, if we just use any word as we please, then we have to define our use of that word each time so that others who use the same word in a different way know what we mean - quite cumbersome that. I believe you meant MacArthur's warblers...and, if you read his paper today= , I think you might find a bit of him proving what he wanted to see. I could say more, but typing with a cast makes one be brief Jim On 11/23/07, William Silvert [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We ecologists define the niche. We can stick with the Hutchinsonian definition, or we can modify it in ways we might find more useful. Niches, empty or not, are not fixed. If there is a lot of breadth, then organisms will tend to partition the hyperspace among themselves. Consider David Lack's warblers, who ended up occupying the same trees but at different heights above the ground. I think he identified three species. = I suspect that if the trees were shorter he might have found just two, and if they were taller, more than three. The concepts of niche and speciation are complicated and we are still working on them. To do so effectively, we should try to free ourselves from rigid definitions, although of course we always have to be clear what we mean. The reason I like the term empty niche is not that I am against Hutchinson and his disciples, but because it is a useful concept. If we reject it, and insist instead on circumlocutions like potential resource manifold in hyperspace not currently fully exploited by any species then it interferes with our doing science. Bill Silvert - Original Message - From: Warren W. Aney [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: William Silvert [EMAIL PROTECTED]; ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Sent: Friday, November 23, 2007 6:18 PM Subject: RE: unoccupied niches and 'competitive exclusion Does the species define the niche? Or (in evolutionary terms) does the niche define the species? David seems to be saying that the species defines the niche and Bill seems to be arguing that the niche exists independent of the species filling it. Did Darwin's Galapagos finches evolve to fit pre-existing niches, or did they define the niche as they evolved? --=20 James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecologia e Din=E2micas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paran=E1, Brasil E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Telefone: 55 41 33857249 Mobile: 55 41 99870543 http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Ecologia e Conserva=E7=E3o na UFPR http://jjroper.googlespages.com Personal Pages
Re: ECOSYSTEM HEALTH Diversity and of Terminology Re: Invasives
or buts. That is sim= ply not a scientific approach, not is it realistic or pragmatic. Other scenarios and paradigms must be recognized and considered in order for respectful and honest discussion can take place. Working with knotweed in Vermont, Kelly Stettner, Director Black River Action Team Springfield, VT www.blackriveractionteam.org -= - Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2007 10:18:47 - From: William Silvert Subject: Re: ECOSYSTEM Health Alien invasions persistence decline limits control Re: semi-silly question from John Nielsen I'll pick up on two of Wayne's points. One is that some aliens that do little harm -- this is true, and some aliens are introduced deliberately. Mustangs are alien to N. America, and are widely appreciated. Many ornamental plants are deliberately introduced. My mother was a member of the Florida Native Plants Society, and felt that they were fighting a losing battle against the imports. An interesting downside is that often introduced plants in dry areas require lots of water and this creates problems. As for the comment that healthy ecosystems resist invasion, this depends on whether they have had a chance to immunise themselves by past experience. Because mammals were unknown in Australia, their introduction was impossible to resist. The same is often true when snakes or mosquitos arrive in regions where nothing similar has every been present. Often the best defence against an invading species is a predator that can control it, but if such predators are not already present, it may take a few million years for them to evolve. Sometimes man has tried to counter one alien invasion by introducing another alien species to control it -- which brings into action the Law of Unintended Consequences. It's a tricky game to play. Bill Silvert - Be a better sports nut! Let your teams follow you with Yahoo Mobile. Try it now. --=20 James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecologia e Din=E2micas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paran=E1, Brasil E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Telefone: 55 41 33857249 Mobile: 55 41 99870543 http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Ecologia e Conserva=E7=E3o na UFPR http://jjroper.googlespages.com Personal Pages
Re: ECOLOG-L Digest - 15 Nov 2007 to 16 Nov 2007 (#2007-310)
Kelly, I respectively disagree. Introduced species are bad, no ifs ands or buts Some of them are naturalized and so there is probably absolutely nothing we can do about them. The others often have potential for causing catastrophe, and it is hubris to think that we can just USE them to suit OU= R purposes (of what, fixing something that we already messed up?) with no repercussions. Also, your argument below is circular. An ecosystem that is very diverse has the exotics as part of the calculation of diversity, so less diverse will have fewer species overall. Also, healthy does not equal diverse - else deserts and alpine systems are all unhealthy. If you say that within any biome, the most healthy are the most diverse, I bet you do not have the data to support that stand. Is leaching copper good? What does filter toxics mean? The take toxins from the soil and do what with them? And, what do they do in areas that have no toxins when they escape cultivation? Complicated issues, and I think the best answer is never introduce, plant natives, eliminate exotics. Cheers, Jim On Nov 19, 2007 4:54 PM, Kelly Stettner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote= : Bill (and all): interestingly, it has been proven that ecosystems with a large degree of biodiversity (read: healthy ecosystems) have more varieties of invasives present than those ecosystems that have less biodiversity. I can dig up the studies, if anyone is interested. There is always the question of what good do invasive species (particularly plants) do in an ecosystem? Yes, here I go again, playing Devil's Advocate...but consider for a moment how some of these rampant, densely-populated plant colonies effectively fix carbon from the atmosphe= re, alter the soil chemistry and hence the soil zoology and biology (potentia= lly for the better?), and some even filter toxic chemicals from the soil. Fo= r example, Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica, Polygonum cuspidatum) appe= ars to thrive in old mines, being quite adept at leaching out copper from the soil. I think that a lot of ecological thought can be turned on its ear = by thinking outside one's paradigm, looking at the bigger picture. But Bill= is right in that so very many people make abolishing invasives their life's work...their sole raison d'etre. Invasive =3D Evil, no ifs, ands or buts= . That is simply not a scientific approach, not is it realistic or pragmat= ic. Other scenarios and paradigms must be recognized and considered in order for respectful and honest discussion can take place. Working with knotweed in Vermont, Kelly Stettner, Director Black River Action Team Springfield, VT www.blackriveractionteam.org -- Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2007 10:18:47 - From: William Silvert Subject: Re: ECOSYSTEM Health Alien invasions persistence decline limits control Re: semi-silly question from John Nielsen I'll pick up on two of Wayne's points. One is that some aliens that do little harm -- this is true, and some aliens are introduced deliberately= . Mustangs are alien to N. America, and are widely appreciated. Many ornamental plants are deliberately introduced. My mother was a member of the Florida Native Plants Society, and felt that they were fighting a losing battle against the imports. An interesting downside is that often introduced plants in dry areas require lots of water and this creates problems. As for the comment that healthy ecosystems resist invasion, this depends on whether they have had a chance to immunise themselves by past experience. Because mammals were unknown in Australia, their introduction was impossible to resist. The same is often true when snakes or mosquitos arrive in regions where nothing similar has every been present. Often the best defence against an invading species is a predator that can control it, but if such predators are not already present, it may take a few million years for them to evolve. Sometimes man has tried to counter one alien invasion by introducing another alien species to control it -- which brings into action the Law of Unintended Consequences. It's a tricky game to play. Bill Silvert - Be a better sports nut! Let your teams follow you with Yahoo Mobile. Try it now. --=20 James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecologia e Din=E2micas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paran=E1, Brasil E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Telefone: 55 41 33857249 Mobile: 55 41 99870543 http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Ecologia e Conserva=E7=E3o na UFPR http://jjroper.googlespages.com Personal Pages
Re: ECOLOG-L Digest - 17 Nov 2007 to 18 Nov 2007 (#2007-312)
In many schools, environmental science is soft ecology and the environment. I actually attended a graduate level seminar course called the philosophy of ecology - only to discover I was the only student in th= e class who knew what the definition of ecology was - the rest thought of it as either environmental sciences or tree hugging 101. My suggestion wa= s that the students need a lower level course that reinforces their knowledge to get them to a level for a real ecology course. Cheers, Jim On Nov 19, 2007 6:24 PM, Kelly Stettner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote= : So, if the students do not have that background, then I think you are wasting your time teaching ecology and what you should be teaching is environmental studies. That could easily be geared to unprepared undergrads, and could fill in some of those voids that you mentioned your students have. Cheers, Jim Yikes! As a self-teaching student with Vermont College myself, I am cringing at the thought of an unprepared undergrad attempting to grasp environmental studies WITHOUT a solid understanding of multi-disciplinary ecology. I am finding that too many of my fellow students are single-min= ded and wholly without any concept of basic scientific principles or methods. They are feeling with their emotions instead of thinking with their brai= ns. That, in my opinion, sets the stage for disaster -- truly caring people = out there attempting to fix nature's problems with solutions that cause worse problems than before. All in the name of The Environment...and no science in sight. No geology, climate history, basic chemistry or physic= s or thermodynamics. In other words, as a student, I do not consider myself a responsible scientists unless and until I realize that each question I answer leads t= o more questions. Respectfully, Kelly Stettner, Director Black River Action Team [EMAIL PROTECTED] Black River Action Team (BRAT) 45 Coolidge Road Springfield, VT 05156 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.blackriveractionteam.org ~Making ripples on the Black River since 2000! ~ - Be a better pen pal. Text or chat with friends inside Yahoo! Mail. See how. --=20 James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecologia e Din=E2micas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paran=E1, Brasil E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Telefone: 55 41 33857249 Mobile: 55 41 99870543 http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Ecologia e Conserva=E7=E3o na UFPR http://jjroper.googlespages.com Personal Pages
Re: Throwing away the textbooks
I teach ecology to grad students here in Brazil, and the problems are similar. However, the simple truth of the matter is that Andy is apparentl= y teaching ecology to students who do not have the appropriate pre-requisites Sure, the university may not force formal pre-requisite= s on the students, but to study ecology, the student should already have studied introductory biology (and so SHOULD know the difference between a lizard and a salamander) and preferably other, more advanced, courses in th= e biological sciences. Also, a fundamental premise of ecology is evolution b= y natural selection - the students should understand that first. So, if the students do not have that background, then I think you are wasting your time teaching ecology and what you should be teaching is environmental studies. That could easily be geared to unprepared undergrads, and could fill in some of those voids that you mentioned you students have. Cheers, Jim On 11/17/07, Andrew Park [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Ecologgers, Responses are invited to the following thoughts, especially from experienced teachers: I teach a 2nd year course in basic Ecology at an undergraduate university. After four years of teaching this course, I am being drawn to the following conclusions: [1] ? The textbook is awful. Not only that, but all the textbooks I have looked at that are aimed at teaching an overview of Ecology seem t= o be chronically faulted: * There is simply too much stuff in them. My course is one semester long, but even if it were a full year course, I could probably cover less than 50% of this book. ** The books are grossly overpriced. Some students are unable to afford them, and since the publisher is constantly coming out with slightly altered ?new? editions, the resale price is low. *** The material they cover and their overall emphasis, appears to be poorly selected and framed given the tenor of current public discourse on ecology and environment. Finally, I believe that I can do this stuff better myself. Although there are commonalities among all universities, the sociocultural backgrounds of students and the bioregional contexts in which we work differ greatly. How can a mass-produced textbook ever hope to capture that? [2] ? Students today are different. Numerous research studies and even more anecdotal evidence suggest that numerical skills, basic literacy, the ability to organize information into coherent arguments, and engagement with the natural world are all worse than they were (even) a decad= e ago. And yet textbooks speak to students as though they know how to rea= d a graph, as though they are sophisticated reasoners, and perhaps mos= t importantly, as though they already understand the difference between salamanders and lizards, spiders and insects. NEWSFLASH ? THEY DON?T. [3] Because of [1] and [2], I conclude that I need to take a radically different approach to teaching this basic course: * The course needs to be longer, probably split into ?Basic? and ?Advanced? Semesters ** A module on the basic variety of life needs to be built into the course. *** The course has to contain materials relevant to modern environmental discourse. For example, discussions of energy transfer and primary productivity cannot really be taught without reference to the human appropriation of primary productivity. At the same time, the traditional technical basis for teaching ecology cannot be abandoned. the question is, how to make it as engaging as some of the more sexy, issue-based stuff. * Finally I believe that I may throw away the textbook, along with most of the powerpoints, the WEB-CT site and a lot of the other technological paraphernalia that often seems to distract as much as it informs. I WOULD LIKE TO GET SOME RESPONSE TO THESE THOUGHTS FROM TEACHERS. IN PARTICULAR: * Have any of you decided to chuck the required text and simply use handouts and readings? ** Have you changed the ways that you teach, either to reflect our current environmental crisis, or to reflect the preparedness of students. *** What, in your opinion, are the ESSENTIAL things that we have to teac= h in basic Ecology courses. Sincerely, Andy Park (Biology Department, University of Winnipeg) --=20 James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecologia e Din=E2micas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paran=E1, Brasil E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Telefone: 55 41 33857249 Mobile: 55 41 99870543 http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Ecologia e Conserva=E7=E3o na UFPR http://jjroper.googlespages.com Personal Pages
Re: Field Technician Position
Hello all, A suggestion, if I may, on posting positions such as this one. I live in southern Brazil (am American), and often have students, both undergrad and grad, who would love an opportunity like this. It would be fantastic if the job description included whether the job is open only US citizens or otherwise. And, believe me, this kind of experience would be fantastic for many Latin Americans. And, the restriction that they need to identify (for example) eastern US birds would be no problem, because they would work hard to learn the entire gamut of species available before starting. After all, they have a lot of practice with learning a much greater diversity of species. Just a thought! Jim Emma Willcox said the following on 02/Oct/07 15:15: Field Technician Needed An energetic field technician is sought to work as part of a team conducting research on vegetation and avian community response to habitat restoration programs (fire and mechanical treatments) on south Florida rangelands. Responsibilities will include vegetation, insect, and seed sampling, and conducting point counts. For a recent graduate with the desired qualifications, this position will provide valuable field experience. Qualifications: B.S. degree in wildlife, range, natural resource management, or related field; previous field experience; ability to identify birds of the eastern U.S. by sight and sound preferred; experience with vegetation sampling an advantage; valid drivers license; capacity and willingness to work both independently and as part of a team. Employment period end of January 2008 through the end of August 2008. Compensation: $300-340/week depending on experience, free basic field housing. Closing date: November 1, 2007. To apply, please send a letter of interest, resume, and contact information for three references to: Emma Willcox Graduate Assistant Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences University of Florida 308 Newins-Ziegler Hall PO Box 110430 Gainesville, FL 32611-0430 Phone: 352-846-0558 Fax: 352-392-6984 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Email applications encouraged. -- James J. Roper, Ph.D Evolutionary Ecology and Population Dynamics - Caixa Postal 19034 Curitiba, Paraná 81531-980 Brasil E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone in Brazil: 55 41 33857249 FAX in Brazil: 55 41 32662042 Celular: 55 41 99870543 - http://jjroper.googlepages.com/home http://arsartium.googlepages.com
Re: OpenOffice bug hits multiple operating systems
In fact, this is NOT relevent, considering that OpenOffice is now on versio= n 2.3, and that article is about 2.0.6! On 9/26/07, Sharif Branham [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This article seems relevant in light of some of the recent conversations about alternatives to MS Excel. Security experts have discovered vulnerabilities in OpenOffice.org that could allow attackers to remotely execute code on Linux, Windows or Apple Mac-based computers. http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6209919.html?tag=3Dnl.e550 --=20 James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecologia e Din=E2micas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres -- Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paran=E1, Brasil -- E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Telefone: 55 41 33857249 Mobile: 55 41 99870543 -- Ecologia e Conserva=E7=E3o na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Personal Pages http://jjroper.googlespages.com
Re: Ecology Text suitable for grades 9-12
Beth, It is fantastic that you are teaching ecology to younger students. But, I think you do not need a text book, especially to make it interesting for the students. First, YOU should have a text book for yourself - and I recommend Ricklefs, for several reasons, one of which is the extensive web-based information that you can access. Use that book to guide YOU and your students, but make them study the topics based on their own experiences, logic, directed readings from (perhaps) chapters from Ricklefs and a variety of popular books (Tropical Nature, any of the many books about Darwin, and so on). Have them research local flora and fauna using Field Guides from your area. You present them with questions about how natural selection (and evolution by natural selection) would work, and so on and so forth. Get the students involved as active participants in nature - books are too dry. I teach many field courses and see that most college students (and each year is worse) have no field experience - they don't even know what common birds (easy to see), plants (even easier) and other organisms are, much less what they do. If students started learning about ecology by watching nature rather than keeping their noses in books, I think they would be better off (don´t get me wrong, they will absolutely NEED books to help them understand what they see!). Cheers, Jim Beth Callaghan said the following on 23/Sep/07 12:52: Anyone have any recommendations on an ecology text suitable for grades 9-12? thanks. Beth Callaghan Easthampton High School Easthampton, MA -- James J. Roper, Ph.D. James J. Roper Ecologia e Dinâmicas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Telefone: 55 41 33857249 celular: 55 41 99870543 Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Econciência - Consultoria e Traduções http://jjroper.googlespages.com
Re: why scientists believe in evolution
Clearly that wise philosopher was not a scientist! After all, what really comes from the heart is blood. Faith also comes from the head. After all, belief, reason, knowledge, superstition and so on are all matters of the gray matter. Jim On 8/28/07, Warren W. Aney [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: A student once asked a science teacher, What is most important, knowledge or belief? The professor answered, Knowledge, of course. The student then asked a church pastor the same question, and the pastor replied, Belief, of course. The student then went to a wise philosopher with this question. The wise philosopher said, Both knowledge and belief are important, but they are matters of the head. Faith is really what is most important, because faith is a matter of the heart. Warren W. Aney Senior Wildlife Ecologist Tigard, Oregon -Original Message- From: Ecological Society of America: grants, jobs, news [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of James J. Roper Sent: Monday, August 27, 2007 5:28 PM To: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Subject: Re: why scientists believe in evolution A comment on this question. I would draw to our attention that the question Why do scientists believe...? is phrased in the same context as Why do people believe...in = a god. However, this wording falsely put those two questions into the same apparent conceptual framework. However, I would say that scientists do not believe but rather they accept that the evidence for all the testable hypotheses of origins, adaptations and so on are supported by evolution by natural selection (with minor quibbles here and there on details). On the other hand, and contrastingly, religious people really do just believe without testing alternative and testable hypotheses. So, with religion comes a belief system, with science comes accepting the evidence. Those ar= e both not the same conceptual thing. Jim
Re: ECOLOG-L Digest - 26 Aug 2007 to 27 Aug 2007 (#2007-234)
David, I disagree. To explain why, I will tell a very short story. In my college logic class my debate group presented a stand: The god of popular Christia= n theology does not exist. In that stance, we noted that what people believ= e today is not supported by the bible, especially the old testament. We foun= d that many of the concepts that people today give their Christian god are no= t necessarily from the bible nor religious doctrine. That being the case, from whence those ideas? Now, the current understanding of the evolution of life on the planet clearly rejects outright a literal interpretation of the bible - let=B4s = not beat around the bush about that. It also unequivocally rejects the stories in the Kentucky Creation Museum! :-) For a scientist then, or I should sa= y an evolutionary scientist, there are stories that are supported by evidence and there are stories that are not supported by evidence. Biblical stories about creation and miracles are stories without evidence (some biblical stories about history have other sources of substantiating evidence, some d= o not), and so to suggest that an evolutionary biologist has no conflict with such stories is probably incorrect. No good scientist accepts any stories with no evidence - SETI scientists aside. And we must remember that there are other creation stories out there with similar amounts of evidence as the Judeo-Christian story. Remember, consensus does not equal fact, so belief systems are not subject to democracy (the majority is correct). Cheers, Jim On 8/28/07, Tessler, David F (DFG) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This email is in response to the following posting: Date:Sun, 26 Aug 2007 22:08:38 -0400 From:Carissa Shipman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Christianity survey I am a biology student at Temple University and I have conducted an NSF funded systematics project for the order Hymenoptera at the American Museum of Natural History. My question is why is the scientific community so convinced of evolution? -- I enjoyed reading all the well considered, informed responses (with references!) to Carrissa Shipman's innocently na=EFve supposition/questio= n. However, I was surprised that there was one point no one really nailed on the head. There is no reason for Christians (or anyone else) to fear evolution. Th= e theory of evolution in no way denies or contradicts the existence of God = - of any god or any religion for that matter.
Re: why scientists believe in evolution
bring your education up to current issues. I'll bet the people in your lab would be glad to hear your thoughts, and if not, you are surrounded by resources that can answer your question: why is the scientific community so convinced of evolution? RBurke Carissa Shipman [EMAIL PROTECTED] 08/26/07 10:08 PM I am a biology student at Temple University and I have conducted an NSF funded systematics project for the order Hymenoptera at the American Museum of Natural History. My question is why is the scientific community so convinced of evolution? There are very few publications concerning evolution at the molecular or biochemical level. Most scientists are baffled at how such molecular systems such as blood clotting actual evolved in a step by step manner. It looks to me like many of the molecular inter workings all needed to be there simultaneously for the end product to function properly. The biosynthesis of AMP is just as baffling. How could that have happened in a step by step fashion? You can speculate, but no evolutionist has the answer. So if you can not explain how the most nitty gritty machines of life molecules learned to function in the intricate ways that they do why are you so certain that everything evolved? Science is looking at the details. All science textbooks I have read have relayed very little evidence of evolution at the molecular level. They just say it happened. Since Darwinian evolution has published very few papers concerning molecular evolution it should perish. Systematics addresses genetic similarities between species, but it does not address exactly how those genetic differences and similarities came to be. There maybe fossils and genes, but you need more than this. I am not convinced of evolution, but still choose to educate myself in what it teaches and believes. How do scientists explain how even the slightest mutation in the human genome is highly detrimental most of the time? If even the slightest change occurs in our =3D=3D=3D message truncated =3D=3D=3D _= ___Ready for the edge of your seat? Check out tonight's top picks on Yahoo! TV. http://tv.yahoo.com/ --=20 James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecologia e Din=E2micas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres -- Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paran=E1, Brasil -- E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Telefone: 55 41 33857249 Mobile: 55 41 99870543 -- Ecologia e Conserva=E7=E3o na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Personal Pages http://jjroper.googlespages.com
Re: hunting conservation/was ECOLOGY Conservation Principles and Transformations Re: primate watching
and beautiful form of the bird, and realized that he had just diminished that beauty (not to mention the structural and real violence used to appreciate it). He realized that the real beauty was in the live duck and its environment--earth, water, and the fire in its heart and mind, once beating and cycling much like his own. He resolved, in that moment, to work in defense of waterfowl, and that decision paid off handsomely for him, internally and financially.* A transformational moment? Hunting: a necessary or useful transition? I could tell you similar tales . . . WT * This, of course, is my version of Hyde's story; it may have suffered in the retelling, for which I apologize in advance. At 03:40 AM 8/13/2007, William Silvert wrote: This is an interesting idea, but the analogy to bird-watching is weak. There are only a few primates that are serously endangered, mostly the great apes, and I think that anyone motivated by life lists would simply head for Madagascar and count lemurs. I suspect that getting a lot of spotters into the field would have a negative impact on the species being spotted. It is worth keeping in mind that one of the most successful measures in bird conservation is the habitat preservation by Ducks Unlimited, whose motiv= e is to shoot ducks! Bill Silvert - Original Message - From: WENDEE HOLTCAMP [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Sent: Sunday, August 12, 2007 7:19 PM Subject: primate watching I read something recently where someone was pondering whether we could create a system of primate watching, similar to birdwatching, as a wa= y to channel funds into primate conservation. So instead of life lists for birds (or in addition to) they would have life lists for primates. I though= t this was really interesting and was just going to try to pitch an article on it, but now I can't seem to find it anywhere - I didn't find it from a google search and I can't remember if I saw this in the news or a scientific journal TOC, or what. I am pretty sure it was a primatologist or biologist/ecologist making the statement. Does this ring any bells for anyone? If so please contact me offlist [EMAIL PROTECTED] Wendee ~~ Wendee Holtcamp * Freelance Writer * Photographer * Bohemian http://www.wendeeholtcamp.com/ http://www.wendeeholtcamp.com Bohemian Adventures Blog * http://bohemianadventures.blogspot.com/ http://bohemianadventures.blogspot.com The Fish Wars: A Christian Evolutionist http://thefishwars.blogspot.com/ http://thefishwars.blogspot.com ~~ Online Writing Course Starts Sep 15. Sign Up Now! --=20 James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecologia e Din=E2micas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres -- Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paran=E1, Brasil -- E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Telefone: 55 41 33857249 Mobile: 55 41 99870543 -- Ecologia e Conserva=E7=E3o na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Personal Pages http://jjroper.googlespages.com
Re: primate watching
While the analogy is weak, the potential is still there. After all, monkey watchers spend hours and hours watching the same monkeys, while bird watchers move from species to species. So, the objective of monkey watching, while in part might be the making of a life list, would probably mostly be to just watch them behave. So, instead of life list of species, it might be a life list of behaviors that they record. Just like who (in birding) has the longest list of species gains status, for monkey watchers perhaps who saw the most unusual behaviors would gain status. So, I think the potential is there, just need a catalyst. Jim On 8/13/07, William Silvert [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This is an interesting idea, but the analogy to bird-watching is weak. There are only a few primates that are serously endangered, mostly the great apes, and I think that anyone motivated by life lists would simply head for Madagascar and count lemurs. I suspect that getting a lot of spotters int= o the field would have a negative impact on the species being spotted. It is worth keeping in mind that one of the most successful measures in bird conservation is the habitat preservation by Ducks Unlimited, whose motive is to shoot ducks! Bill Silvert - Original Message - From: WENDEE HOLTCAMP [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Sent: Sunday, August 12, 2007 7:19 PM Subject: primate watching I read something recently where someone was pondering whether we could create a system of primate watching, similar to birdwatching, as a way to channel funds into primate conservation. So instead of life lists for birds (or in addition to) they would have life lists for primates. I thought this was really interesting and was just going to try to pitch an article on it, but now I can't seem to find it anywhere - I didn't find it from a google search and I can't remember if I saw this in the news or a scientific journal TOC, or what. I am pretty sure it was a primatologist or biologist/ecologist making the statement. Does this ring any bells for anyone? If so please contact me offlist [EMAIL PROTECTED] Wendee ~~ Wendee Holtcamp * Freelance Writer * Photographer * Bohemian http://www.wendeeholtcamp.com/ http://www.wendeeholtcamp.com Bohemian Adventures Blog * http://bohemianadventures.blogspot.com/ http://bohemianadventures.blogspot.com The Fish Wars: A Christian Evolutionist http://thefishwars.blogspot.com/ http://thefishwars.blogspot.com ~~ Online Writing Course Starts Sep 15. Sign Up Now! --=20 James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecologia e Din=E2micas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres -- Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paran=E1, Brasil -- E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Telefone: 55 41 33857249 Mobile: 55 41 99870543 -- Ecologia e Conserva=E7=E3o na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Personal Pages http://jjroper.googlespages.com
Re: primate watching
~~~=3D0A Online Writing Course Starts Sep = 15. Si=3D gn Up Now!=3D0A=3D0A=3D0A=3D0A=3D0A=3D0AJulie Wieczkowski, Ph.D.=3D= 0AAssistant Profes=3D sor=3D0ADepartment of Anthropology=3D0A332 Pafford=3D0AUniversity of We= st Georgia=3D =3D0ACarrollton, GA 30118=3D0A678-839-6458 (ph)=3D0A678-839-6466 (fax)=3D0Ajuliewhi=3D [EMAIL PROTECTED]/~jwhiz --=20 James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecologia e Din=E2micas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres -- Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paran=E1, Brasil -- E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Telefone: 55 41 33857249 Mobile: 55 41 99870543 -- Ecologia e Conserva=E7=E3o na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Personal Pages http://jjroper.googlespages.com
Re: permanent mapped tree plots
In Brazil, INPA (Institute for research in the Amazon) has the PPBIO and PELD. You can find some information here: http://www.inpa.gov.br/index.php Jim On 8/2/07, Weimin Xi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dear All, I am looking for information regarding world-wide existing long-term permanent mapped tree plots, regional or international network of monitoring permanent plots (with individually numbered trees, similar to those long-term mapped tree plots in Harvard Forest and Duke Forest, and BCI 50-hectare permanent tree plot). Any leads (such as the names of projects/networks, web links, or references) would be greatly appreciated. Weimin --=20 James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecologia e Din=E2micas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres -- Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paran=E1, Brasil -- E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Telefone: 55 41 33857249 Mobile: 55 41 99870543 -- Ecologia e Conserva=E7=E3o na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Econci=EAncia - Consultoria e Tradu=E7=F5es http://jjroper.googlespages.co= m
Re: Calculating volume question
I can't understand why you would even want volume, instead of the two direct measures of area that you have. In any analysis you could easily use the two measures as probably two independent variables, and they would provide you more information than the volume you are after. After all, a million different shapes can have the same volume, but the unique areas in two dimensions are going to be unique for each thing being measured. Jim A. Rabatsky said the following on 22/Jul/07 12:02: I'd like to know how to calculate volume using 2 measures of either area or perimeter. I have 2 digital photographs, one provides a top view and one provides a side view, of the object that I want to calculate the volume of. I need to know if there's a mathematical formula that I can plug in area from the top view area from the side view to get volume. I can add photos later if need be. Thanks. -- James J. Roper, Ph.D. James J. Roper Ecologia e Dinâmicas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Telefone: 55 41 33857249 celular: 55 41 99870543 Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Econciência - Consultoria e Traduções http://jjroper.googlespages.com
Re: assisted migration (not)
Good point Bill. But, while some things may be labeled assisted migration many things that fall under that heading are not. Such as the Florida Torreya, the first example in the Conservation Biology paper on the topic. That would clearly be called something like Assisted range extension. So, we do not want to classify processes that are fundamentally different under the same heading. And, while sure, we screw up a river, we should try to make it still habitable for the regional fauna, when we screw up the planet, the job becomes overwhelming and outside of our understanding of how to do so. Interestingly, I just read that some physicist (clearly not a biologist) says that we need to colonize Mars within the next, what, 45 years, for the continuation of the human species - that might be considered assisted migration. Cheers, Jim William Silvert said the following on 19/Jul/07 17:59: To return to a previous posting, what would you use to describe fish raceways, such as those used to help salmon bypass dams? I cannot think of a better term than assisted migration. Bill Silvert - Original Message - From: DAVID WHITACRE [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2007 9:26 PM Subject: assisted migration (not) Migration is the repeated movement back and forth of a population. = This new phrase assisted migration, in contrast, seems to apply to = human assistance in dispersal/range extension, to compensate for climate = change. Clearly the term is already spawning confusion. I suggest we banish it = in its infancy, and use a term such as assisted dispersal, species = translocation, or something that accurately describes the idea. Dave Whitacre -- James J. Roper, Ph.D. James J. Roper Ecologia e Dinâmicas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Telefone: 55 41 33857249 celular: 55 41 99870543 Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Econciência - Consultoria e Traduções http://jjroper.googlespages.com
Re: assisting natural processes
While you may be right about change faster than nature, what you are implying may not be so easily done. Indeed, what it sounds like to me is basically translocation of plants - introducing species in places where we think they would end up after some interval of time, given large uncertainties in climate change. First, we must remember that introduced species are a major environmental problem today - basically, we have alread= y introduced weeds and invasive plants and animals the world over. Will we continue that process thinking that where we put the organisms is where nature will have done so eventually? Evolution is a predictive process? Maintaining adaptedness? I am at a loss to even figure out what that means. Organisms are adapted by natural selection to their environments. Stephen J. Gould has shown us that this can happen quickly, and Darwin figured it to happen slowly. But, there is ample evidence that it can happen relatively quickly. Maintaining adaptedness seems to me to imply stasis - keeping plants the way they are in the face of climate change by moving them to places for which they are already adapted. Just monitoring climate and imagining moving plants around to follow what we think are goin= g to be long-term climate changes (considering how much they can vary over ou= r lifetimes without really changing in the long term context) gives me the heeby jeebies - as someone said, a way for someone to get funded for years to come, but with no real scientific basis or accounting. After all, how would we know it worked? Check back in 500 years, 1000? Finally, you mentioned trees, but what about the millions of other species in a community or ecosystem? Do we assume that the species we don't move around will figure out how to find and follow the ones we do? We should all read David Ehrenfeld's great book, now out of print - The arrogance of humanism - so that we can look on our supposed fix-its for what they are - self-deception that when things get bad enough, someone wil= l come up with a way to fix it. The only problem is, fix-its usually don't. Sure, we can build underpasses for turtles, salamanders and what not, and teach a Whooping Crane how to fly south for the winter, but for the million= s of other species that will have to cope, these are psuedo-solutions that only give funding to the wrong places. What we need is prevention, because we sure won't know how to fix what we are breaking. Cheers, Jim On 7/19/07, jerry rehfeldt [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: There's no doubt whatsoever that projected rates of change are far greate= r than natural processes can accommodate. Maintaining adaptedness in plant populations will require the assistance of mankind to transfer the appropriate populations of the appropriate species to the new location of their climatic optima. Assisting migration, therefore, is only a part of the managerial options. Maintaining adaptedness, particularly in trees, will require us to participate in the evolutionary process; we must be willing to provide the fuel for speeding up the process of selection. In forestry, the information is available for providing appropriate guidelines. However, I am not aware of current reforestation, rehab, or conservation programs that are targeting climates of the 2020's. The closest that I know of involves the effort of researchers to find a 'home' in British Columbia for populations of California's Brewer spruce, a species classified today as threatened. --=20 -- James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecologia e Din=E2micas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres -- Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paran=E1, Brasil -- E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Telefone: 55 41 33857249 Mobile: 55 41 99870543 -- Ecologia e Conserva=E7=E3o na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Econci=EAncia - Consultoria e Tradu=E7=F5es http://jjroper.googlespages.co= m
Re: ECOLOGY Mathematics and the metamathematics of evasive ecology? Re: Request: Data sets for biocalculus project
Mattheus, You are showing some misunderstanding of the use of statistics. A few observations. 1. If your results are so glaringly obvious, then the question was probably not very interesting, or a logical consequence of the methods. 2. Questions that are not so simple need statistics to discover the probability of something happening when it is not obligatory that it happen. statistical tests when you can simply draw a plot and your conclusion comes? 3. A plot can mislead. I need to learn that populations must be normal, they must be homoscedastic, there are at least 3 models for ANOVA, there is something out there with the name of ANCOVA, and I have no single idea if this is useful for me or not. 4. The assumptions of ANOVA are not as rigid as you imply. ANCOVA combines regression with ANOVA, often a very useful tool. I admit that in some cases statistical tests do help to understand the obtained results, but the path to dominate and understood what is behind is long, and not easy. 5. I tell my students that intuition is wrong, until we have a solid grasp of the probabilities involved. Humans tend to bias their perspectives. So, statistics helps us to avoid our own tendentiousness. The tools, like any tools, require practice and use to master them. Therefore, I follow with my faith. 6. There is no place in science for faith. I use my software and it gives me the indexes that will allow me or not to do my parametric tests, and then I apply the tests,only to confirm something that I knew weeks ago. 7. If you are getting indexes, then you probably should not be doing parametric tests And, as I said, if it is that simple, it probably wasn't very interesting scientifically. Or I learn that my observation is not good because I could not achieve enough power with my test. And then I have the alternative of doing a similar test, but I don't like the idea of learning another test, and then I discover that I need to do other kinds of preliminary tests... wow, maybe you get the point. 8. The point is, apparently, that you do not understand statistics, nor their usefulness. And, you want to blame statistics for that. I know this will lead to nothing, but I would like to say: isn't much better only do the right plots and look at the data? 9. One should always plot data - that does not mean you will always recognize the patterns. And, how do you plot correctly? What if there are multiple interactions? Only plots that are derived from or guided by the correct analyses will tell you what you want to know. So, you need to know the stats. A pit that such ideas are not more widespread. They would save some of my time. 10. You will save time by studying the correct methods of analysis for your area, and becoming familiar with them. Or collaborate with someone who has a knack for the things you don't care to know about. -- James J. Roper, Ph.D. James J. Roper Ecologia e Dinâmicas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Telefone: 55 41 33857249 celular: 55 41 99870543 Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Econciência - Consultoria e Traduções http://jjroper.googlespages.com http://people.sightspeed.com/link/vnfmnadoam/ My status skype:jjroper?call
Re: assisted migration
Interesting concept - if you take my sarcasm. Let's imagine that migration took eons to evolve - do we have such hubris that we think we can predict evolution? With global warming, will animals need to migrate anymore, or will migration be even more important? And, if we translocated some animals, are they going to know that the idea was for them to migrate? Are we going to net populations of birds, turtles and wildebeest and move them to another place, hoping that they will figure it out? But, that is just my humble opinion Cheers, Jim On 7/18/07, David Inouye [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: John Nielsen, a Correspondent on the Science Desk at NPR News in Washington DC is working on a story about assisted migration as it relates to global climate change. I have heard that while there are no official translocations taking place at the moment, there's a lively scientific debate going on about whether there will or should be. I'd like to hear what the folks who subscribe to the ECOLOG listserve think of assisted migration. --=20 -- James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecologia e Din=E2micas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres -- Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paran=E1, Brasil -- E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Telefone: 55 41 33857249 Mobile: 55 41 99870543 -- Ecologia e Conserva=E7=E3o na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Econci=EAncia - Consultoria e Tradu=E7=F5es http://jjroper.googlespages.co= m
Re: Database for field notes
Seems funny to me that this question even happens. Any reasonable statistical package will allow you to do this. Of course, you would want your field notes to be in a sensible format for them to be analyzed. Otherwise, if you type in field notes once to just have them in electronic form, then later type in the data to do analyses, then you are doing a lot of extra needless work. Chances are, after you decipher your data for analysis, there is really very little left over for notes that could not easily be converted to some kind of short hand for typing into the same data file. They way you describe your needs, I do all of that with a very succinct data base in SAS, JMP, R or whatever. Jim Michael Batcher said the following on 08/Jul/07 13:20: Does anyone have suggestions for a database with which to keep field notes. I use ACCESS, but the text field length is limited. I want to be able to search notes by date, species, location, and other fields and develop queries and reports as a result. Thanks in advance. -- James J. Roper, Ph.D. http://jjroper.googlepages.com/home Universidade Federal do Paraná Depto. de Zoologia Caixa Postal 19020 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone/Fone/Teléfono: 55 41 33611764 celular: 55 41 99870543 Revista Brasileira de Ornitologia http://www.ararajuba.org.br/sbo/ararajuba/revbrasorn.htm Zoologia na UFPR http://zoo.bio.ufpr.br/zoologia/ Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Currículo Lattes http://lattes.cnpq.br/2553295738925812 E-mail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone/Fone/Teléfono: 55 41 33611764 Alternativa: 55 41 33857249 celular: 55 41 99870543 Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Páginas Académicas http://jjroper.googlepages.com/home Consultoria e Traduções http://arsartium.googlepages.com/home XXVII Congresso Brasileiro de Zoologia http://www.cbz2008.com.br/ Call me! skype:jjroper?call
Re: News: Conservatives Split Over Darwin and Evolution
Indeed, the scientific community does not teach belief-systems if it is science-based. And, as you say, we know of no root cause (be careful of that word) for the Big Bang and so on, HOWEVER, using the scientific method= , we can make testable predictions based on the big bang model that answer a lot of questions and stand up to a lot of studies. We also don't have any understanding of what causes gravity (gravitons?), but we can certainly send people to the moon, which means we understand pretty well how gravity works (just not why). I would posit that there is no reason to think that we should be able to explain all causes (what causes the charge of the electron, what causes gravity, and so on). That implies that everything ha= s a cause and effect. I would suggest that things happen because that is the nature of nature. Science is the means by which we might explain the explicable. It is a long process because we also have to discover what is explicable. But, neither science nor any other thing, by definition, can explain the inexplicable. Atheism is not a belief system, by the way. It is the alternative to a belief system. Are you atheistic of the Easter Bunny? No, you do not even dignify the question of the existence of the Easter Bunny with a reply, because it is just too patently obvious that someone made that up. So, you do not BELIEVE in the NON-existence of the Easter Bunny, you just don't consider it because there is no reason to. Okay, just switch the word god= for the words Easter Bunny and you have atheism. Belief systems are thos= e systems in which one finds guidance, instruction, example, and so on. Huxley coined the word agnostic because he felt that a scientist cannot take a stand on the existence of a god and so one should leave the option open. But, Huxley was from Victorian England, and he, just like Darwin, ha= d to live in a social context that was difficult for an atheist. But, what h= e really was was an atheist - one who takes no stance on the presence of god= because there is just no reason to. Agnostic, leaving the option open, suggests that there is a reason to leave the option open, but, really, ther= e isn't. All that said, science is more fun to talk about than religion. What worries me, and perhaps many of us, is that the christian movement in the states wants to run science to fit in line with their belief systems. But, scientists don't want to run religion - they would just as soon not have to deal with it. Science always loses if someone else tries to control it. To me, that sums the worry. Cheers, Jim On 5/8/07, Markael Luterra [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If we are going to promote a separation of science-based knowledge from faith-based belief, it is equally important that the scientific community does not promote belief systems not directly supported by scientific evidence. There are limits to what science can tell us - we know of no root cause for the Big Bang, no true idea of how very complex brain chemistry creates the self-consciousness that we experience. An open-minded scientific community must not support either natural or supernatural explanations for these phenomena, as there is currently insufficient evidence for either. To say clearly that we believe what the data show and that we do not take a position on what is not known is reconcilable with nearly all religious views, save for the young-earth models and some other very literal interpretations of religious texts. I must say I am taken aback by the efforts of some respected biologists, most notably Richard Dawkins, to actively denounce supernatural belief in all its forms. While it is true that science has so far failed to validate the existence of the supernatural (itself a conundrum since much of what is now natural was once considered supernatural), it is inconsistent with the principles of scientific knowledge to adopt a belief (in the absence of the supernatural) in the absence of solid proof= . What I see is a strong polarization, with religious fundamentalists at one extreme and evangelistic atheists (including many scientists) at the other. I strongly believe that while scientists have a duty to ensure that faith-based beliefs are not falsely presented as scientific knowledge, we also have a duty to ensure that we do not officially, as a group, endorse the belief system known as atheism. To do so is to violate the basic tenets of science and is guaranteed to alienate and anger a large portion of the Earth's population, namely those who uphold religious and/or spiritual beliefs, who may otherwise be more open-minded toward the scientific community. Mark Luterra --=20 James J. Roper, Ph.D. Depto Zoologia,UFPR Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paran=E1, Brasil =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone/Fone/Tel=E9fono
Re: News: Conservatives Split Over Darwin and Evolution
, that is inconsistent with the known laws of science or with what is generally considered in that particular society of true and rational; esp. such a belief in charms, omens, the supernatural, etc. From a scientist's perspective, religion is superstition. Second, religious people are even more dismissive of science and of other religions. The problem is not that scientist's don't deal well with religion, but rather that religion does not deal well with science. You should have said above, Religious people, as responsible citizens, cannot afford to dismiss science because it does not support their faith. Cheers, Jim --=20 James J. Roper, Ph.D. Depto Zoologia,UFPR Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paran=E1, Brasil =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone/Fone/Tel=E9fono:55 41 33611764 celular: 55 41 99870543 Casa: 55 41 33857249 =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D http://jjroper.googlepages.com/ http://arsartium.googlepages.com/ Ecologia e Conserva=E7=E3o na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ XXVII Congresso Brasileiro de Zoologia http://www.cbz2008.com.br/ ---
Re: News: Conservatives Split Over Darwin and Evolution
as scientists is when we insist that only the scientifically observable realm is real and important; that the religious realm is just irrelevant superstition. We may indidually choose to believe that to be the case, but we shouldn't do so with a hubris of scientific arrogance by saying, in effect, if it can't be measured it can't be valid. As I said before, science is never going to be able to explain everything. What science can and will explain is crucial, but some of the inexplicables are pretty important to quite a few other people. And many of these other people are rational scientists. Warren W. Aney Senior Wildlife Ecologist (and Presbyterian elder) -Original Message- From: Ecological Society of America: grants, jobs, news [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Ashwani Vasishth Sent: Saturday, 05 May, 2007 08:22 To: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Subject: News: Conservatives Split Over Darwin and Evolution http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/05/us/politics/05darwin.html?ref=science A Split Emerges as Conservatives Discuss Darwin By PATRICIA COHEN Published: May 5, 2007 Evolution has long generated bitter fights between the left and the right about whether God or science better explains the origins of life. But now a dispute has cropped up within conservative circles, not over science, but over political ideology: Does Darwinian theory undermine conservative notions of religion and morality or does it actually support conservative philosophy? On one level the debate can be seen as a polite discussion of political theory among the members of a small group of intellectuals. But the argument also exposes tensions within the Republicans' big tent, as could be seen Thursday night when the party's 10 candidates for president were asked during their first debate whether they believed in evolution. Three - Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas; Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas; and Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado - indicated they did not. For some conservatives, accepting Darwin undercuts religious faith and produces an amoral, materialistic worldview that easily embraces abortion, embryonic stem cell research and other practices they abhor. As an alternative to Darwin, many advocate intelligent design, which holds that life is so intricately organized that only an intelligent power could have created it. Yet it is that very embrace of intelligent design - not to mention creationism, which takes a literal view of the Bible's Book of Genesis - that has led conservative opponents to speak out for fear their ideology will be branded as out of touch and anti-science. [...] Cheers, - Ashwani Vasishth[EMAIL PROTECTED] (818) 677-6137 http://www.csun.edu/~vasishth/ http://www.myspace.com/ashwanivasishth -- James J. Roper, Ph.D. http://jjroper.googlepages.com/home Universidade Federal do Paraná Depto. de Zoologia Caixa Postal 19020 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone/Fone/Teléfono: 55 41 33611764 celular: 55 41 99870543 Revista Brasileira de Ornitologia http://www.ararajuba.org.br/sbo/ararajuba/revbrasorn.htm Zoologia na UFPR http://zoo.bio.ufpr.br/zoologia/ Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Currículo Lattes http://lattes.cnpq.br/2553295738925812 E-mail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone/Fone/Teléfono: 55 41 33611764 Alternativa: 55 41 33857249 celular: 55 41 99870543 Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ Páginas Académicas http://jjroper.googlepages.com/home Consultoria e Traduções http://arsartium.googlepages.com/home XXVII Congresso Brasileiro de Zoologia http://www.cbz2008.com.br/ Call me! skype:jjroper?call
Field course, Avian Ecology and Conservation in Bocas del Toro
Hello all, The Institute for Tropical Ecology and Conservation (ITEC, http://www.itec-edu.org/) is hosting a field course entitled Ecología y Conservación de Aves Tropicales in Bocas del Toro, Panamá, this July (9-31). The course will be taught in Spanish, but can be taken by students from anywhere, IF they feel that they can attend to the Spanish. The course is also geared towards advanced undergrads but especially graduate students. At ITEC, there is great interest in cross-cultural interactions and studies, and all too often this type of course is geared towards non-Latin Americans. The instructor has over 20 years experience in Central and South America and speaks English (native), Spanish and Portuguese. For more information, visit http://www.itec-edu.org/ and http://www.itec-edu.org/spanishbird.html Thank you, Jim -- = James J. Roper, Ph.D - Caixa Postal 19034 Curitiba, Paraná 81531-980 Brasil E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone in Brazil: 55 41 33611764 FAX in Brazil: 55 41 32662042 Celular: 55 41 99870543 - http://jjroper.googlepages.com
Re: Absolute Addiction to Catastrophic Consumption
armaments production of high technology implements of war that are capabl= e of killing countless citizens of other countries whose national needs are in competiton with those of American citizens. So we shop and kill and kill and shop and it is all one endless destructive cycle, as interlinked as any ecological system's components. We are used to killing our competitors. Ranchers kill ground squirrels and prairie dogs that compete for grass. We kill coyotes and wolves that compete for our livestock. We kill termites that compete for our finishe= d lumber. In a world of increasing competition for resources, with a still-growing human population and retaining the idiotic priority of yet more economic growth, the killing will only continue and increase. Will we ever learn? I think we may be asking the wrong question. Can we ever learn as a species that an appropriate level of consumption i= s the key to survival, but catastrophic consumption kills? And our society/culture is as addicted to catastrophic consumption as a junkie is to heroin. The junkie often harms only himself, but we are harming biodiversity, ecosystems, planetary cycles and processes, and our unborn children. Stan MooreSan Geronimo, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED] _ It's tax season, make sure to follow these few simple tips http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Taxes/PreparationTips/PreparationTip= s.a spx?icid=3DHMMartagline --=20 James J. Roper Depto Zoologia,UFPR Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paran=E1, Brasil =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone/Fone/Tel=E9fono:55 41 33611764 celular: 55 41 99870543 Casa: 55 41 33857249 =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D http://jjroper.googlepages.com/ Ecologia e Conserva=E7=E3o na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ ---
Tropical Avian Ecology and Conservation
Hello All, For those interested in field courses, geared to advanced undergraduates and graduate students, checking out ITEC might be a good choice. In addition, if you speak some Spanish and would like a multi-cultural field course in Avian Ecology and Conservation, also check out ITEC. Links may be found below: http://www.itec-edu.org/ http://www.itec-edu.org/spanishbird.html Cheers, Jim -- = James J. Roper, Ph.D - Caixa Postal 19034 Curitiba, Paraná 81531-980 Brasil E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone in Brazil: 55 41 33611764 FAX in Brazil: 55 41 32662042 Celular: 55 41 99870543 - http://jjroper.googlepages.com
Re: If not Ethanol, what then?
What exactly IS enhanced biodiversity? That phrase could include abnormally high biodiversity, increased invasive biodiversity and so on and so forth. Greater biodiversity is not necessarily better On 2/2/07, Michael Mellon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thank you for the website and the phrase that caught my eye was: Whether or not yields are enhanced by diveristy remains an open question. However, there is no question that harvesting grasslands, even low-diversity and degraded grasslands, enhances their biodiversity. Hopefully, funding agencies will start supplying funds so we, as scientist, can answer this question more fully. In Nebraska, using corn for ethanol is a big political move by politicians and hopefully we can start using the natural grasslands and benefit from the natural landscape and move away from monocultures. I have enjoyed the discussion Michael Mellon --- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm sure other literature goes more into depth, but Lester Brown's book Plan B: Rescuing a Planet under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble (which I highly recommend, by the way) mentions replacing coal-fired electric power and then using the electricity generated at night (when demand is lower) to produce hydrogen (I presume through electrolysis). This hydrogen can then be burned to produce more electricity during the day, or be pumped into cars for transportation, etc. -Tim Nuttle I looked at Mike's web page and I am quite ignorant about the bioenergetcs of various terrestrial crops (I work in the marine environment where plants are those little one-celled critters), but I wonder whether if grasses are so suitable for biofuels, what about the discarded parts of food crops, such as corn stalks and potato plants. I realise that there is nutritional benefit to plowing them under, but could they be used in other ways? Another poster mentioned hydrogen and a reduced population -- I really don't see how we could get enough hydrogen from wind and solar power unless we used a lot of hydrogen fusion to greatly reduce our population. Bill Silvert - Original Message - From: Palmer, Mike [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: William Silvert [EMAIL PROTECTED]; ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Sent: Friday, February 02, 2007 3:51 PM Subject: RE: [ECOLOG-L] If not Ethanol, what then? Bill, Quite a number of people are working on the use of Low-Intensity, High-Diversity (LIHD) systems (to use Dave Tilman's term). This contrasts markedly with High-Intensity, Low-Diversity (HILD) systems such as corn or transgenic Miscanthus. LIHD systems have advantages in not only being carbon-negative, but in promoting biodiversity and preventing habitat loss and degradation (see my arguments in http://ecology.okstate.edu/Libra/biofuels.htm ) ---Mike Palmer -Original Message- From: Ecological Society of America: grants, jobs, news [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of William Silvert Sent: Friday, February 02, 2007 8:51 AM To: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Subject: [ECOLOG-L] If not Ethanol, what then? In the recent discussion of biofuels, there seems to be a consensus that producing ethanol from corn has serious adverse consequences both ecological and economic. However I have not seen anyone address the broader question of what alternatives we have in the long run. Fossil fuels will eventually run out - oil in a century or so at most, coal in several centuries - and while there may be some wonderous new technology to fill the gap, we cannot count on that. I suspect that combustible fuels will always be with us, and I wonder what they will be. Bill Silvert _= ___ Cheap talk? Check out Yahoo! Messenger's low PC-to-Phone call rates. http://voice.yahoo.com --=20 James J. Roper Depto Zoologia,UFPR Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paran=E1, Brasil =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone/Fone/Tel=E9fono:55 41 33611764 celular: 55 41 99870543 Casa: 55 41 33857249 =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D http://jjroper.googlepages.com/ Ecologia e Conserva=E7=E3o na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ ---
Re: Ethanol (in)efficiency
to the mark, the emerging competition between cars and people for grain will likely drive world grain prices to levels never seen before. The key questions are: How high will grain prices rise? When will the crunch come? And what will be the worldwide effect of rising food prices? From an agricultural vantage point, the automotive demand for fuel is insatiable. The grain it takes to fill a 25-gallon tank with ethanol just once will feed one person for a whole year. Converting the entire U.S. grain harvest to ethanol would satisfy only 16 percent of U.S. auto fuel needs. The competition for grain between the world's 800 million motorists who want to maintain their mobility and its 2 billion poorest people who are simply trying to survive is emerging as an epic issue. Soaring food prices could lead to urban food riots in scores of lower-income countries that rely on grain imports, such as Indonesia, Egypt, Algeria, Nigeria, and Mexico. Today's Ithaca Journal has a report on Mexican President tries to contain tortilla prices due to a surge in corn prices driven by the US ethanol industry. Seems like the riots are about to start... And Iowa may have to import corn next year, from who knows where? http://www.farmandranchguide.com/articles/2007/01/05/ag_news/letters_and _editorial/letter02.txt According to IATP numbers, the biofuel boom - if fulfilled - will require Iowa to import 200 million bu. of corn, rather than export 670 million bu. as it did in 2005/06. Nebraska would need even more, 421 million bu., to fill its ethanol-made hole. Now, here is just one sentence from myself: If - as it seems - ethanol is a hoax, shouldn't we speak up, also for th= e sake of the remaining prairies that might be at stake? Maiken Maiken Winter Cornell Laboratory of Orntihology Ithaca, NY 14850 - Sucker-punch spam with award-winning protection. Try the free Yahoo! Mail Beta. --=20 James J. Roper Depto Zoologia,UFPR Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paran=E1, Brasil =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone/Fone/Tel=E9fono:55 41 33611764 celular: 55 41 99870543 Casa: 55 41 33857249 =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D http://jjroper.googlepages.com/ Ecologia e Conserva=E7=E3o na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ ---
Re: Log transformation of negative values in SAS??
Sami, Remember, depending on the analysis, you want to have normal RESIDUALS and not necessarily normal distributions of the raw data. It is quite possible that you have a normal distribution of your residuals. If not, since you have flux, you could always use the true value for N20 at each measurement, and not flux. The true value will always be positive. Cheers, Jim On 1/30/07, Sami Ullah [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello Ecologers: I have a data set of N2O fluxes from forest soils in which some values ar= e positive and some negative. As the distribution in non-normal, I want to log-transform the data. However, the log transformation command in SAS transform positive values and ignores the negative. Can anyone guide me o= n how to log-transform the data using SAS or anyother software to be able t= o take care of both the positive and negative values. Thanks in anticipation. Sami Ullah Department of Geography McGill University, Canada [EMAIL PROTECTED] --=20 James J. Roper Depto Zoologia,UFPR Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paran=E1, Brasil =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone/Fone/Tel=E9fono:55 41 33611764 celular: 55 41 99870543 Casa: 55 41 33857249 =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D http://jjroper.googlepages.com/ Ecologia e Conserva=E7=E3o na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ ---
Re: critical essay on the antics of Irwin and Treadwell
and gain, or to enhance one's ego. I have always used bears as a medium to teach and communicate about science and nature, but in ways not detrimental to the bears. Likewise, for decades I have been trying to encourage wildlife agencies, wildlife researchers, managers, law enforcement people, and university-level wildlife departments to deal with extensive wildlife exploitation within the mass media, the wildlife film industry, and wildlife film marketing. Professionals, well aware of the terrible impacts on wildlife by market hunters early in the 1960s, have steadfastly remained in denial about wildlife in the wildlife film marketplace. Even today, almost no wildlife management, research, or law enforcement is practiced on, focused on, or taught about the enormous, deleterious effects of bad wildlife filmmaking, distribution, marketing or screening. I often note that hunters, fishermen and trappers are constantly controlled, regulated, held to high sportsman standards and pursued for violations. The typical hunter has a wad of papers about 200 pages long in his or her pocket in order to stay legal, to guide on bag limits, seasons, hunting times, sex and age, closed or open areas, care of the meat, caliber of the rifle or type of shot used, etc. In the meantime, those same agencies encourage and aid countless filmmakers, camera crews, photographers, editors, writers, and whatever to go out and do whatever they want, when they want and where they want. Staff biologists are not encouraged to monitor, evaluate and speak out on, or control, wildlife productions. The content is basically considered entertainment for in the evening, not a wildlife professional's responsibility. Treadwell, for example, was allowed to do many things illegal for others to do. Worse, perhaps, the needed standards, ethical evaluations, impacts on wildlife and actions needed are not included in wildlife textbooks or classrooms. The whole matter is studiously ignored, as not important in the profession of wildlife biology, despite the 29 years that IWFF and the Great Bear Foundation have called for action. Poachers with a camera still mostly write their own rules. People like Irwin and Treadwell still do what they damn well please with animals-countless actions that a hunter would be fined and jailed for. Star-struck is for kids, not wildlife professionals. Filmmaking should not be an allowable way to exploit wildlife for money and fame. The National Geographic Society and the Discovery Channel and all of their defenders should hang their heads in shame for promoting stupid TV actions over sound wildlife biology. So why does this problem go on forever? People steal the charisma of the animals to boost their own ego and status, which translates into money. It is always the money. So far as I care, wildlife will be considerably better off without Treadwell and Irwin. Where are the other voices of the people who should object? Why should the balance always be stacked for the sensational, the glitz? Charles Jonkel is president of the Missoula-based Great Bear Foundation -- -- - James J. Roper, Ph.D. Universidade Federal do Paraná Depto. de Zoologia Caixa Postal 19020 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil = E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone/Fone/Teléfono: 55 41 33611764 celular: 55 41 99870543 = Zoologia na UFPR http://zoo.bio.ufpr.br/zoologia/ Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ - http://jjroper.sites.uol.com.br Currículo Lattes http://lattes.cnpq.br/2553295738925812
Re: Wow! Amazing responses to comments on Steve Irwin!
learned by all those little kids who loved to see him hold up an exploite= d lizard or snake and mischeviously display his smarmy face for the camera. No, I was not a Steve Irwin fan, and I don't believe that his approach wa= s a net positive for wildlife. I never heard a serious conservation message from him that taught anything resembling responsibility for the preservation and conservation of wildlife. It is easy to enjoy something that entertains you for the moment, but to accept responsibility for the difficult work and sacrifices involved in conservation is something completely different. And, while I have not reached audiences of millions, I have trapped hundreds of raptors in the local area and displayed some of them to local landowners and their children who allowed me access to their properties and wished t= o see the wild raptors prior to release. I would never trap a raptor for the primary purpose of displaying to the public, but I have banded many birds under the gaze of little children who I believe could benefit in a small way from such encounters. When I watched Steve Irwin's shows on television, I never saw any research taking place -- I saw capture of wildlife apparently solely for the purpose of entertaining kids and I would be astonished if an unhealthy collection of kids around the world are not currently grabbing, harrassing, annoying, and harming wildlife because they saw Steve Irwin d= o it on television, with no discussion of responsibility and possible harm to the subjects of that treatment. So, am I way offbase? I am willing to consider the possibility that I am= , but I have yet to see a convincing argument that I am. Cheers all! Stan Moore San Geronimo, CA[EMAIL PROTECTED] --=20 - James J. Roper UFPR, Zoologia Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paran=E1, Brasil =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D E-mail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone/Fone/Tel=E9fono: 55 41 33611764 celular:55 41 99870543 =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D Ecologia e Conserva=E7=E3o na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ - http://jjroper.sites.uol.com.br
Re: PCA question
Washington University, St. Louis, MO http://www.biology.wustl.edu/larsonlab/people/Gifford/Matt's_webpage.ht ml -- Department of Biology PO Box 1848 University of Mississippi University, Mississippi 38677-1848 Brewer web page - http://home.olemiss.edu/~jbrewer/ FAX - 662-915-5144 Phone - 662-915-1077 *** Christopher M. Taylor Associate Professor of Biological Sciences Dept. of Biological Sciences Mississippi State University Mississippi State, MS 39762 Phone: 662-325-8591 Fax: 662-325-7939 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www2.msstate.edu/~ctaylor/ctaylor.htm -- Department of Biology PO Box 1848 University of Mississippi University, Mississippi 38677-1848 Brewer web page - http://home.olemiss.edu/~jbrewer/ FAX - 662-915-5144 Phone - 662-915-1077 = -- - James J. Roper, Ph.D. Universidade Federal do Paraná Depto. de Zoologia Caixa Postal 19020 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil = E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone/Fone/Teléfono: 55 41 33611764 celular: 55 41 99870543 = Zoologia na UFPR http://zoo.bio.ufpr.br/zoologia/ Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ - http://jjroper.sites.uol.com.br Currículo Lattes http://lattes.cnpq.br/2553295738925812
Re: Why not a law..Evolution
But Malcolm, It is not the Theory of Evolution that is the theory, but rather the Theory of Evolution BY NATURAL SELECTION that is the theory. While most of us would agree that there is ample proof, it should also be understood why it must be considered a theory and not a law. A law is universally true, while a theory is provisionally true. We all can imagine cases in which some characteristic of an organism was due to genetic drift or some other form of accident that favored a given trait. We can also remember th= e Spandrels of San Marcos (Stephen J. Gould) and so recognize that we cannot call everything we see a product of evolution by natural selection, If we do so, without proof, then we are making assertions of faith. So, until we prove that all features of living things are adaptations that were formed by natural selectionthe theory of evolution by natural selection remains just that. But what a wonderful and explanative theory! And we all KNOW that evolution happened, evolution is not a theory, it is a fact, and not a law. Cheers, Jim On 8/16/06, Malcolm McCallum [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I wonder if it is time to stop calling it the Theory of Evolution and start calling it the Law of Evolution, and to stop referring to evolutionary theory and surplant that with evolutionary law. Lets face it, there has to be more evidence for evolution than there was for Gravity, etc. when they were moved to law status. Do we know of any case where organisms were not adapted by or succumb to some outside force? Sounds like a law to me. VISIT HERPETOLOGICAL CONSERVATION AND BIOLOGY www.herpconbio.org http://www.herpconbio.org A New Journal Published in Partnership with Partners in Amphibian and Reptile Conservation and the World Congress of Herpetology. Malcolm L. McCallum Assistant Professor Department of Biological Sciences Texas AM University Texarkana 2600 Robison Rd. Texarkana, TX 75501 O: 1-903-223-3134 H: 1-903-791-3843 Homepage: https://www.eagle.tamut.edu/faculty/mmccallum/index.html From: Ecological Society of America: grants, jobs, news on behalf of Ashwani Vasishth Sent: Tue 8/15/2006 10:13 PM To: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Subject: Commentaries on science and on evolution There are two commentaries in the current issue of Bioscience that I thought worth considering, in the particular context of the current deba= te about the teaching of evolution science in our schools The first, by Ross H. Nehm, Faith-based Evolution Education? (638 BioScience * August 2006 / Vol. 56 No. 8 www.biosciencemag.org) argues that scientists, generally defined, have limited themselves to generating belief statements on evolution, rather than scientifically and systematically addressing the misconceptions inherent in lay beliefs and = in creationist rhetoric. In addition, we need to get much better at showing people why a knowledge of evolution science matters, to everyday folks, o= n an everyday basis. The second, by Margaret Wertheim, Who Is Science Writing For? (640 BioScience * August 2006 / Vol. 56 No. 8 www.biosciencemag.org), argues that science writers, generally defined, are not positioning themselves where the readers are, in America, but rather are catering to a very narr= ow (and quite small) self-selecting cluster of individuals who actively seek out science-related material. We need to get better at doing what she ca= lls missionary work. Cheers, - Ashwani Vasishth [EMAIL PROTECTED] (818) 677-6137 Department of Urban Studies and Planning, ST 206 California State University, Northridge http://www.csun.edu/~vasishth/ --=20 - James J. Roper UFPR, Zoologia Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paran=E1, Brasil =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D E-mail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone/Fone/Tel=E9fono: 55 41 33611764 celular:55 41 99870543 =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D Ecologia e Conserva=E7=E3o na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ - http://jjroper.sites.uol.com.br
Re: Maldaptation, Extinction and Natural selection
of the higher animals, directly follows. I personally feel the same way. In any universe that I would build, there would be no death, no aging, no sickness or war. The only rub is that I have no idea how such a world could either come into being or how it could be maintained. In Darwin's alternate universe of death and famine, we unfortunately have a simple, easy-to-understand mechanism, one that does eventually builds the most exalted objects which we are capable of conceiving, the production of the higher animals. Wirt Atmar -- - James J. Roper, Ph.D. Universidade Federal do Paraná Depto. de Zoologia Caixa Postal 19020 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil = E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone/Fone/Teléfono: 55 41 33611764 celular: 55 41 99870543 e-fax:1-206-202-0173 (in the USA) = Zoologia na UFPR http://zoo.bio.ufpr.br/zoologia/ Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ - http://jjroper.sites.uol.com.br
Re: Evolution Environment Adaptation Re: Maldaptation, Extinction and Natural selection
Joerg, I like your analogy, and many studies have compared fitness landscapes to your topography that you describe here. Note, those are fitness landscapes, not Natural Selection landscapes. So, if you are in a wide flat plane, you might compare that to Gould's equilibrium in his context of punctuated equilibrium. That is, no natural selection is taking place. You may go extinct because you run out of space, a disease comes along and so forth, but, no natural selection needs to be taking place. An analogy from maths (where I come from): in global optimization, if you are on a wide flat plane and you have no clue in which direction to go to find the valley, you are stuck with the solution you have at hand. It might be a rather bad one (extinction) but anywhere you turn it doesn't get (much) better. That doesn't mean that in many cases optimization algorithms won't work they do even in quite bad conditions if you have a lot of time to search. So I think it just comes down to the degree of maladaptation versus the likely rate of change. And, we must understand that while adaptation is the process whereby natural selection over time (evolution) forms features that permit organisms to do well, we cannot think that maladaptations are formed by the same process. Accidents (meteors, floods, continental drift, climate change) may make something that was once useful into something that is no longer useful, but the maladaptation was not made for that new scenario through natural selection. So, care must be used in thinking about the process. Cheers, Jim -- - James J. Roper, Ph.D. Universidade Federal do Paraná Depto. de Zoologia Caixa Postal 19020 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil = E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone/Fone/Teléfono: 55 41 33611764 celular: 55 41 99870543 e-fax:1-206-202-0173 (in the USA) = Zoologia na UFPR http://zoo.bio.ufpr.br/zoologia/ Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ - http://jjroper.sites.uol.com.br
Re: Maldaptation, Extinction and Natural selection
All, I think this question is important, in that apparently there are a variety of opinions out there as to what Natural Selection does and does not. In all this discussion, nobody that believes NS favors extinction has put NS into a logical framework (premises, assumptions, - basically, a syllogism) that would explain the process. AND, it seems to me that most that opine that NS favors extinction, seem also to think that extinction only occurs by evolution by NS. I would say that extinction can occur for many reasons that have nothing to do with natural selection. In today's world, habitat loss, disease, exploitation, and so on. Probably was true in the past as well. It is not true that every extinction was the result of a struggle between a winning species and a losing species. The syllogism that best explains (in my book) NS is the following: IF 1. Individuals vary phenotypically for some trait or traits, AND 2. Those traits are due to genotypic variability, AND 3. Fitness is associated with those phenotypic trait or traits, THEN, Individuals with the trait associated with greater fitness will leave MORE genes of that phenotypic trait in subsequent generations. Ergo, Natural Selection. If conditions favor that same process for many generations, we are likely to have evolution by natural selection. And, remember, phenotypic variation may be only environmental. Now, I would say, with this syllogism, just like the expression SH__ HAPPENS we can say extinction happens with or without natural selection. . Finally, we can think of evolution by natural selection as a process that generates adaptations. Adaptations are advantages given a certain set of environmental circumstances. Sure, adaptations in the wrong circumstances can become hindrances, but natural selection did not make them to hinder the organism. Rather circumstances changed (Ice Age, for example). Difficult to imagine natural selection favoring a maladaptation Fitness is defined as differential reproductive success, not natural selection. Cheers, Jim Jane Shevtsov wrote: Imagine a stable population in which a favorable new genotype has appeared and is increasing. That sure looks like selection FOR the new genotype to me. On the other hand, if we start with the same population and change the environment so some of the old genotypes no longer do well, I'd call that selection AGAINST those genotypes. This is all just semantics. If confused, stick to differential reproduction. Jane At 07:16 AM 7/13/2006, Malcolm McCallum wrote: Am I understanding you correct? =20 Natural Selection selects against unfavorable phenotypes. Sexual Selection selects for favorable phenotypes. =20 =20 =20 VISIT HERPETOLOGICAL CONSERVATION AND BIOLOGY www.herpconbio.org = http://www.herpconbio.org=20 A New Journal Published in Partnership with Partners in Amphibian and = Reptile Conservation and the World Congress of Herpetology. =20 Malcolm L. McCallum Assistant Professor Department of Biological Sciences Texas AM University Texarkana 2600 Robison Rd. Texarkana, TX 75501 O: 1-903-223-3134 H: 1-903-791-3843 Homepage: https://www.eagle.tamut.edu/faculty/mmccallum/index.html =20 From: Ecological Society of America: grants, jobs, news on behalf of = James J. Roper Sent: Thu 7/13/2006 6:37 AM To: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Subject: Re: Maldaptation, Extinction and Natural selection But Wirt, Natural selection doesn't cull but rather it favors. And selecting for something is very different than selecting against something.=20 Favoring a trait leads to adaptation. That is, those with a trait leave more descendents. Even so, it is not that simple. At any rate, John Endler does a wonderful job of clearing things up with Natural Selection in the Wild and I highly recommend it for anyone who has not read it, and, don't forget, The Extended Phenotype by Dawkins, that should also be required reading. Interpreting literally what I wrote leads to a condition that I = normally rail against myself. Selection never selects for anything. Selection = operates only as a culling mechanism, removing the least appropriate, least = competitive phenotypes of the demic excess that currently fills the competitive = arena. =20 What the heck does demic excess really mean? Cheers, Jim == The whole person must have both the humility to nurture the Earth and the pride to go to Mars. --Wyn Wachhorst, The Dream of Spaceflight Jane Shevtsov co-founder, http://www.worldbeyondborders.org/World Beyond Borders visit my blog, http://perceivingwholes.blogspot.com/Perceiving Wholes Perhaps one day... the world, our world, won't be upside down, and then any newborn human being will be welcome. Saying, Welcome. Come. Come in. Enter. The entire
Re: Mark-Recapture in R
Ned, I believe you are interested in a Linux-based program. If so, I second the motion. I am trying to get rid of Windows, but there are a few statistical programs that I still need and use. If any of you out there know of good survival and capture-recapture software for Linux, probably many of us would be grateful. Also, in case any of you are interested in converting, there is a fantastic version of linux made for us dummies (at least, until we learn to use it well). It is called Ubuntu, and can be downloaded for free at http://www.ubuntu.com/ Cheers, Jim Ned Dochtermann wrote: Is anyone aware of mark-recapture libraries for R? Specifically Pradel models? I have searched the various listservs via CRAN's recommended search engines as well as the available libraries to no avail. Thanks for any help. Ned Dochtermann * Ned Dochtermann [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.unr.nevada.edu/~dochterm/ 775-784-6781 Graduate Group in Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology Fleischman Agriculture Building, Room 145 University of Nevada, Reno * Beyond such discarded fundamentals as 'matter' and 'force' lies still another amidst the inscrutable arcana of modern science, namely, the category of cause and effect. Karl Pearson -- - James J. Roper, Ph.D. Universidade Federal do Paraná Depto. de Zoologia Caixa Postal 19020 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil = E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone/Fone/Teléfono: 55 41 33611764 celular: 55 41 99870543 e-fax:1-206-202-0173 (in the USA) = Zoologia na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/zoologia/ Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ - http://jjroper.sites.uol.com.br
Re: Maldaptation, Extinction and Natural selection
But Wirt, Natural selection doesn't cull but rather it favors. And selecting for something is very different than selecting against something. Favoring a trait leads to adaptation. That is, those with a trait leave more descendents. Even so, it is not that simple. At any rate, John Endler does a wonderful job of clearing things up with Natural Selection in the Wild and I highly recommend it for anyone who has not read it, and, don't forget, The Extended Phenotype by Dawkins, that should also be required reading. Interpreting literally what I wrote leads to a condition that I normally rail against myself. Selection never selects for anything. Selection operates only as a culling mechanism, removing the least appropriate, least competitive phenotypes of the demic excess that currently fills the competitive arena. What the heck does demic excess really mean? Cheers, Jim -- - James J. Roper, Ph.D. Universidade Federal do Paraná Depto. de Zoologia Caixa Postal 19020 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil = E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone/Fone/Teléfono: 55 41 33611764 celular: 55 41 99870543 e-fax:1-206-202-0173 (in the USA) = Zoologia na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/zoologia/ Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ - http://jjroper.sites.uol.com.br
Re: Maldaptation, Extinction and Natural selection
Norris, I think you have a good point to illustrate the problem: Imagine the case where you have two phenotypically identical populations that have different underlying genetics. If these populations have different heritabilites, application of the identical selective pressures could lead to dramatically different outcomes. In this scenario only the responses to selective pressures would differ. It would seem inconsistent to me to retro-actively claim that natural selection was only operating in the one case where there was a response. Rather, natural selection was only effective in producing evolutionarily relevant change in one case. There is no inconsistency, because for natural selection to act, the phenotype must have a connection (heritability) with its underlying genotype. So, in your example above, let's just say that one population's phenotype was totally environmental (a good year, perhaps) while the other population's identical phenotype was genetic. Well, in both cases perhaps the individuals with the same, high quality phenotype would be favored (leaving more descendants) but only the population with a genetic basis would leave behind the tendency that was based on the phenotypic expression of the genotype. The other, in a different environment, would no longer show the same phenotype. Did I explain well? Cheers, Jim -- - James J. Roper, Ph.D. Universidade Federal do Paraná Depto. de Zoologia Caixa Postal 19020 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil = E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone/Fone/Teléfono: 55 41 33611764 celular: 55 41 99870543 e-fax:1-206-202-0173 (in the USA) = Zoologia na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/zoologia/ Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ - http://jjroper.sites.uol.com.br
Re: Maldaptation, Extinction and Natural selection
Wirt, I will certainly disagree here! Friendly disagreement, of course. In my continuing bid to become the group's curmudgeon, Since there are no other candidates, I guess you will be elected! :-) Natural selection judges only whatever advantages it finds in populations in the moment. What it truly never does is assess the long-term consequences of its preferences. Natural selection is not a judge. It is only differential representation of genes in subsequent generations, in which more successful genes become more common from one generation to the next. Sure, natural selection can be occurring while extinction is taking place, but the extinction is NOT the result of natural selection. For example, we could say that natural selection is favoring longer bills, while habitat loss is eliminating the species. That is, those birds with longer bills leave relatively more descendents, but, it is a moot point because it was habitat loss that eliminated the species. The first is the reversion of a sexual lineage back to parthenogenesis. Parthenogensis is unaffected by natural selection, because one of the premises of natural selection is genetic variability among the population. And, the accident of becoming parthenogenetic also was NOT the result of natural selection, but rather a point event. Doing this offers the lineage a number of hypothetical advantages, most especially freeing itself from the burden of maintaining males Males are not a burden. Species do not suffer ecological costs, individuals do. And, you would not say often find a situation in which males compete with females, and both lose future reproductive success due to this competition. A population free of males is also capable of rapid expansions into recently vacated territories. But, not for reasons of natural selection. It can also survive in extremely adverse situations where a sexual population would go extinct, simply due to low population numbers and the difficulty in finding a mate. Often, species that reproduce both sexually and asexually do the sexual part exactly WHEN the conditions are adverse, presumably because it is precisely those conditions that favor genetic (and phenotypic) variability. Rotifers and aphids, for example. The second condition is the evolution of high-order polyploidy. High-order polyploidy is also the result of point changes in a population, not natural selection. This does not result from a gradual change, nor a genetic tendency? That is, adults do NOT reproduce a variable set of offspring, some polyploid and the rest normal, that after the fact leave a variable number of offspring There is no EVOLUTION for polyploidy, it happens by accident. After that, the polyploid often becomes genetically isolated from its ancestors, and then perhaps natural selection acts on it, and all its polyploid descendents, based on their phenotypic (and underlying genotypic) variability. High-order polyploidy seems on the surface to be an excellent information-assurance mechanism, mitigating the informational corruption of any body of information that is replicated generation after generation indefinitely. Accidents are not adaptations. While we find both types of populations in nature, their rarity is prima facie evidence that they are not strategies that are successful on the long-term, That is a circular argument. Also, there are examples of both that have probably been around since the cambrian. So, duration is also evidence of success. However, the phenomenon is unknown in mammals, and I have long attributed the evolution of differential imprinting of the chromosomes that pass through either maternal or paternal gametogenesis to be an evolutionary brake that prevents a reversion to parthenogenesis in mammals. You cannot call parthenogenesis a reversion, since ancestral vertebrates were probably not parthenogenetic. As accidents, there is nothing to explain. Mammals are just unable to have these kinds of accidents. Hybridizing lizards MAY become parthenogenic (Cnemidophorus), but they don't have to. There are no evolutionary brakes, as that implies planned evolution, and by your own accounting, evolution does not plan...nor does natural selection. Mutations are not planned, they just happen. Cheers, Jim -- - James J. Roper, Ph.D. Universidade Federal do Paraná Depto. de Zoologia Caixa Postal 19020 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil = E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone/Fone/Teléfono: 55 41 33611764 celular: 55 41 99870543 e-fax:1-206-202-0173 (in the USA) = Zoologia na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/zoologia/ Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ - http://jjroper.sites.uol.com.br
Re: Maldaptation, Extinction and Natural selection
It seems to me a bit arbitrary to accept that natural selection is taking place when a certain fraction of individuals are selectively culled from a population, yet when that fraction reaches 100% that something different is necessarily going on. To be sure, the RESPONSE of a population to natural selection when mortality is 100% will be a moot point (unless one is considering selection of higher scale entities, dare I say groups?), but to deny that the same processes are at work seems like a bid for special treatment. Indivdiuals are not selectively culled from a population, but rather they leave fewer descendants than others. I would say that a population decline is probably completely independent of natural selection, in that something else is causing the decline. Natural selection is only about the differential representation of genes in subsequent generations, in which some individuals with some traits leave more descendents - WHEN natural selection is occuring. So, my point has nothing to do with how many individuals are involved. Besides, natural selection works with individuals, not populations... Cheers, JIm -- - James J. Roper, Ph.D. Universidade Federal do Paraná Depto. de Zoologia Caixa Postal 19020 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil = E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone/Fone/Teléfono: 55 41 33611764 celular: 55 41 99870543 e-fax:1-206-202-0173 (in the USA) = Zoologia na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/zoologia/ Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ - http://jjroper.sites.uol.com.br
Re: Maldaptation, Extinction and Natural selection
Sorry, the scenario is to poorly defined to say anything about it, and there is probably no contradiction. But, there is also no reason to think that natural selection is always in action. And, certainly, natural selection CANNOT select for extinction. Read Natural Selection in the Wild by Endler. Jim Kim van der Linde wrote: Hi all, I am having an interesing discussion at the moment about Natural selection. The context is a single population of individuals that, due to changes in the environment, are now maladapted and the population is reducing in size. Based on the often used definition of differential reproduction, when there is not much to differentiate with, there is no longer differential selection, and as such, no natural selection. However, they are maladapted, so unfit to survive. Any opinions about this nice contradiction? Cheers, Kim -- - James J. Roper, Ph.D. Universidade Federal do Paraná Depto. de Zoologia Caixa Postal 19020 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil = E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone/Fone/Teléfono: 55 41 33611764 celular: 55 41 99870543 e-fax:1-206-202-0173 (in the USA) = Zoologia na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/zoologia/ Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ - http://jjroper.sites.uol.com.br
Re: Advice for Managing Email Re: Email list practice Evolution and self administration [Those not interested in the subject, please delete now with my apologies] Re Behavior animal or Ethology in
I think there is an awful lot of worrying about something that ain't broken. If it don't stink, don't stir it. And, as far as announcements go, start the subject line with announcement.] Jim -- - James J. Roper, Ph.D. Universidade Federal do Paraná Depto. de Zoologia Caixa Postal 19020 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil = E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone/Fone/Teléfono: 55 41 33611764 celular: 55 41 99870543 e-fax:1-206-202-0173 (in the USA) = Zoologia na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/zoologia/ Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ - http://jjroper.sites.uol.com.br
Tropical Avian Ecology and Cosnervation in Panama
For all of you students interested in Tropical Avian Ecology, and who speak some Spanish, here is a wonderful course and multicultural experience for you. Tropical Avian Ecology and Conservation in Bocas del Toro, Panamá. This field course, for graduate students as well as undergraduates, is a three week immersion in tropical birds. It will combine ecological theory with hands-on experience in conservation issues. The course, with students from all over Latin America, will include very different perspectives and experiences and ideas on how to do both, science and conservation. Please see http://www.itec-edu.org/ and http://www.itec-edu.org/spanishbird.html for more information. Sincerely, Jim
Re: curriculum question
Bill (and others), Interesting perspective. I am a cynic too, but I take a different angle. In my graduate-level biostatistics class here in Brazil, the students have to read and analyse papers that are using the particular analysis that we are working on that week. I am amazed at the bad statistics, as you are. Regressions that are really correlations, ANOVAS that should have been regressions, incomprehensible multivariate analyses, complete failure to attend to the assumptions, hypotheses that will be rejected by definition and not by compliance with (or not) theory. The students all feel like, since they are reading most papers in English, that they are the ones who don't understand, thinking that all these published papers in many important journals must have gotten published because they were well-written. I have to teach them that, surprising though it may be, these papers have flaws from small to large. HOWEVER, when well-done, statistics clear the confusion. After all, psychologists show that people see patterns where they do not exist. I would say that the obvious patterns do not necessarily need statistics, and the self fulfilled prophecies do not either. However, those kinds of results are boring and obvious. They were probably predictable on general principles and the laws of physics. The not-so-obvious results are the ones that are interesting, and those are also the ones that need statistics to make sure that we are not seeing patterns that do not exist. Without and idea of sampling error and variance, our intuition over whether a pattern exists is error-prone. The only way to control that error is statistics and well-defined studies. So, I say, we need to force the scientific and ecological community to learn how to use the tools of the trade. Nobody need to be immersed in statistics to understand the rules. But, if a person has not taste or patience for statistics, then I suggest that they find a good collaborator who knows statistics well. After all, in most of my helping students develop projects, because of my statistical understanding, I save them all time and frustration. The sample size required to show a pattern is much easier to calculate with a knowledge of statistics, for example. Cheers, Jim Bill Silvert wrote: I didn't expect much agreement with my posting, and I'll just comment on two points that Roper raises, interspersed with his posting below: = Consulto ECONCIÊNCIA Ecologia, Conservação, Ciência e Consciência! Consulting, specializing in Conservation Research Methods, Analysis and Translations. http://www.montanhaviva.org/ecosci/ = James J. Roper, Ph.D. Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paraná, Brasil - E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone/Fone/Teléfono: 55 41 33857249 celular: 55 41 99870543 e-fax:1-206-202-0173 (in the USA) - Ecologia e Conservação na UFPR http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/ -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.362 / Virus Database: 267.12.8/161 - Release Date: 3/11/2005
