Bee Mine

Since global warming, while still threatening everyone, has become somewhat old hat for the news media, it would seem that a new threat is assailing man kind: the loss of honey bees. One quotation that has been popularly used and attributed to Einstein is that if bees die out, then man has four years to live. This is based on the idea that the crops that man kind plants are reliant on honey bees for polination, and would therefore send humanity into starvation if bees died out completely. Snopes.com has classified the claim that Einstein ever said this as uncertain. Until 1994, it seems that no such reference had made it to press (which is why writers should always site their references).
Even if Einstein did say it though, he was not an authority on the subject. Certainly he was a briliant physicist and philosopher, but not a biologist. I say that man kind will not die out as a result of the loss of honey bees. Things won't be super, there will be a difficult adjustment periord, but loss of honeybees alone will not kill us off. The main reason for this is that the majority of crops that we grow are self or wind pollenated. All the grasses (corn, wheat, rice, barley, oats) as well as many legumes (peanuts) and soybeans will be wholey unaffected. Furthermore, honeybees are not the only pollenators. North America alone has more than 3500 species of native bees (most of which don't produce colonies though) which would rise to fill the vacated niche. Also, many species of wasps, beetles, flies, butterflies, moths, ants, bats and hummingbirds also pollenate flowers. Honey bees are not even native to the western hemisphere.
The human reaction to a decrease in honey bees is already seen. Many bee keepers truck their hives from field to field, following the bloom north and are paid well for it. The use of monoculture (only one type of crop in an area) is also declining in some areas so that bees will have a more consistant food suply throughout the year. Similarly, proximity to native grassland or forest also bolster pollination of many crops because native pollinators are more abundant. In the end, if things become too unmanageable, it is likely that new crops or hybrids that don't rely so much on honey bees will be implemented and that agricultural engineers might even produce a mechanical method for mass pollination.
The moral to be learned from this is not that man-kind is doomed, but that we are going to have to learn to be good stuards of our planet, for its sake and for ours.

While Banging My Head on the Desk

The Creation Museum in Kentucky has finally opened after several years of fighting over permits. The museum teaches a 6-day, literal interpretation of the story of genesis and has anamatronics, multi-sensory cinematic productions and all the other things that a $27 million budget gets a museum. Everything that is except for reasonable scientists to currate it and probably also a fossil collection.
Thankfully, because this place is privately owned, it does not count as a governmentally recognised repository for fossils from public lands, but that probably won't stop the owner from purchasing a large collection of fossils that would seem to support his 6-day creation belief.
news article

The Swiss Rock Hammer

There is something little perverse about doing field paleontology with a set of binoculars while sipping Starbucks coffee. It is however an easy paycheck. That is how my week has pretty much been. I've been on construction sites, watching huge machinery move around relatively new (100,000 yrs or younger) alluvium and finding absolutely nothing. On Monday and Tuesday I was in Irvine and was allowed to get relatively close to the equipment as they made a very shallow excavation. Wednesday to Friday however, I was not permitted within 50 feet of where the equipment was cutting a very deep hole in the ground. The latter case wasn't because of any particular resistance by the earth moving crew, but because the ground is contaminated with diesel from when a chevron research facility used to be on the property. As useless as I was made to feel by looking for fossils through binoculars from the top of the pit, I was comforted by the fact that there is a Starbucks across the street and that I'll likely be elsewhere when they start excavating what is lovingly being referred to as "the arsenic hole."

Slighly Over Marketed

While browsing Amazon.com, I came across what must be one of the furthest reaches for marketing of Harry Potter products. It is an actually liscenced Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets fossil kit. It comes with 5 actual fossils as well as an activity to "excavate" a fossil and to imbed something in resin like a piece of amber.

Perhaps my memory is a bit faulty (and I'm sure that a few people would easily be able to corroborate or falsify this) but I'm pretty sure that there are absolutely no mentions of paleontology or fossils in any of the books, much less in the second one. For that matter, sinse when did anybody need to do anything more than mention dinosaurs to make kids interested in a cheap fossil collection? Is there anybody who bought this thing who might not have if it didn't have Harry Potter on it? There are other Harry Potter themed science kits, but they at least have a more plausible tie-in to what the Hogwarts students would be taught.

Oh well, I guess that there really is no stopping marketing execs from taking over every facet of the world around them.

Oh Say Can You See?

Here in the US (and no doubt on US programms broadcasted in other countries) there has been quite a bit of discussion lately about patriotism. Therefore, since I haven't posted anything else in a while, I thought I'd do my own critique of love for one's country. From an evolutionary standpoint, patriotism derives from the preference of those like yourself over those who are less so. In a purely biological setting, differences are indicators of genetics and of upbringing.
continue this essay

Members of a village find the other members attractive because such feelings increase probability of the same genes being propogated, especially when the population is of sufficient size and genetic diversity that ailments don't arise from inbreeding. Xenophobia might be considered an extreme case of this. In a human setting however, our intellect allows us to discern more differences than those of a genetic origin. Traits such as language, culture, dress and religion are differences that distinguish us but have no biological basis, although the instinctual more different = less attractive responce is still in place. Therefore, on an individual basis patriotism stems from an evolutionary process. As will be discussed later, natural selection also serves to perpetuate patriotism. The above form of patriotism, because it is instinctual, I will refer to blind patriotism, the lowest form. Blind patriotism is what gets people to say that "America is the greatest country on Earth" without knowing enough about other countries, or even this one to justify that judgement. Another form of patriotism is more informed. This is the sort of patriotism that says "my country is better than that one because of literacy rates, crime rate, infrastructure, average income, climate, etc." While blind patriotism is about as sensible a thing (in my opionion) to die or kill for as religious conquest or racial cleansing, informed patriotism is what is the current justification for the war in Iraq, the bringing of a better lifestyle to another people: ie spreading democracy. That the military destroyed the Iraqi infrasctructure, which has lead to increases in rates of crime, disease, unemployment, racial cleansing and that the climate can't be fixed is another matter (at least their declared intentions are being recorded as good if their planning wasn't). The third form of patriotism is governmental. When a government has a social contract with its citizenry to look out for its best interests, it is justified in taking advantage of other countries' people for that purpose, just as it is the duty of the other country to stop the first from doing that. As for borders, controlled flow is essential to maintane an inflow of both highly skill and highly unskilled (and therefore cheap) labour, while keeping down poverty levels. Furthermore, governmental patriotism extends into informed patriotism when one claims that country A is better than B because of its form of government; eg. "We're English, our parlamentary system is far superior to that american system because we don't have an electoral college." or "my country could kick your country's ass!" or "if you were better off, we wouldn't export our worst jobs to you." When however, as is often the case, people conflate blind patriotism with governmental patriotism, terrible things happen. Members of the government don't even themselves need to personally have blind patriotism, they just need to utilize it in their constituancy to justify their actions. In the middle east, everyone hates Israel just for being there and being a jewish state among muslim ones. The argument of "it was our/ their land first" is thrown around a tremendous deal. In my opinion, it doesn't really matter in the least who owned the land before. What matters is who owns it now, and who lives there. Claiming a right to property because one's ancestors had possession of it removes personal responsibility from ownership. Just as the sins of the father do not cary to the son, entitlement is not enheritied, it is earned or it is given. A good analogy would be if every black person over the age of fourty in the US claimed that they deserved respect from the younger generation because they faced fire hoses, police and dogs in the fight for civil rights. Everyone should have the civil rights, but the added respect for facing danger only goes to the people who actually faced it. "Respect me, my dad fought for you." says a man. "That's nice, but what have you done?" responds his neighbor. Certainly, in the persuit for personal advantage, people have the right to use whatever argument that they like, especially if it works. The point is that it shouldn't work. The problem lies in that countries that don't succumb to blind patriotism will be overthrown by ones that do. Suppose that two countries start out homogeneous unto themselves, but different from each other. One strives to maintain homogeneaty in its population, while the other accepts people from the first who retain characteristics of their homeland at least initially and gradually come to resemble the average of their new home. Gradually, both countries will be homogeneous again, but will both resemble the one that was resistant foreign influence. Furthermore, an informed patriot may regard immigration as a source of degredation of his or her way of life, but if the new immigrants, who are now protected by governmental contract, have different priorities, then informed patriotism arguments go out the window because the collective metric for judging quality of life has changed. "We brought you democracy" says one. "But you brought with you godlessness and loose ways" says the other. Ultimately, people should not feel indignant in the face of a lack of patriotism, or feel pride in its possession. It is an extension of our biological drive to increase our like kind to the point of domination. Those who are sufficiently intellectual to see both sides of a patriotic dispute will adapt to their surroundings, and ultimately be overtaken by those whose feelings rule even their political actions and aspirations. Thus, mankind is doomed to remain in a primitive state. Stagnation maintained by perpetual change.