A passing visit to the American biologist, E. O. Wilson
E O Wilson
Edward Osborne Wilson was born in June 1929 thus making him, at this time of writing, just into his 82 year. His biological specialty is myrmecology. Got that? Myrmecology. And if you, like me, didn’t have a clue as to what myrmecology is and had to look it up, it is the study of ants. Blow me down, there is even a myrmecology blogsite!
So where is this all heading?
One of the things that we do know about dogs, especially if we go way back into the dim and distant times when they behaved more like the grey wolf, from which the species ‘dog’ genetically originates 100,000 years ago, is that their social order, their pack behaviour, was highly stable. As an aside, when Jean was rescuing dogs in San Carlos, Mexico during the years that she lived there with her late husband she readily observed that the stray dogs, of which there were too many, had a natural propensity to group up into their historic pack formations. (And as an aside to my aside, Jean’s close friend of many years, Dan’s sister Suzann, today carries on the splendid work of looking after stray dogs from her San Carlos house!)
OK, back to the plot!
E O Wilson’s study of ants has revealed much about social order and organisation. The following YouTube video was from a PBS programme, aired in May, 2008, from which I quote (that is the PBS website),
Program Description
At age 78, E.O. Wilson is still going through his “little savage” phase of boyhood exploration of the natural world. In “Lord of the Ants,” NOVA profiles this soft-spoken Southerner and Harvard professor, who is an acclaimed advocate for ants, biological diversity, and the controversial extension of Darwinian ideas to human society.
Actor and environmentalist Harrison Ford narrates this engaging portrait of a ceaselessly active scientist and eloquent writer, who has accumulated two Pulitzer Prizes among his many other honors. Says fellow naturalist David Attenborough: “He will go down as the man who opened the eyes of millions ’round the world to the glories, the values, the importance of—to use his term—biodiversity.”
It’s a fascinating film, truly engaging, so do settle down for a relaxing 53 minutes and watch,
Now there’s more to this and I do want to continue with the theme of this Post tomorrow.
So for now, look in on the E O Wilson Biodiversity Foundation’s website and I’ll see you tomorrow.
Underlining what 30,000 years of domestication produces!
This video, just under 6 minutes long, may well be ‘old news’ to many dog owners but still very much worth a viewing.
Scamp
And while I think about, if you didn’t see the video about Scamp and his ability to identify, and then comfort, humans very close to death, when it first appeared on Learning from Dogs, then do drop back to here and watch it. It’s from the Extraordinary Animals series from Channel Five on British television and just 22 minutes long.
Those of you who have come across Rupert Sheldrake and, in particular his book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home will really not be surprised at what is coming, in terms of the rest of this Post. Because most dog owners know, from countless observations, that dogs have an uncanny ability to see the world around them in a more deeper and intuitive manner than we can explain.
I wrote of Sheldrake’s book on the 1st June including touching on a report of Mason, a small terrier mix …
On April 27th, Mason was hiding in his garage in North Smithfield when the storm picked him up and blew him away. His owners couldn’t find him and had about given up when they came back Monday to sift through the debris, and found Mason waiting for them on the porch.
A few evenings ago, we watched a documentary from the website Top Documentary Films from the series Through The Wormhole. This particular documentary was entitled Is There a Sixth Sense? Here’s how that film was introduced,
Sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch are the tools most of us depend on to perceive the world. But some people say they also can perceive things that are outside the range of the conventional senses, through some other channel for which there is no anatomical or neurological explanation. Scientific researchers who study such abilities call them extrasensory perception (ESP), but lay people often refer to them as the sixth sense.
Either term really is a catch-all for a variety of different purported abilities that vary from person to person. Some people claim the power of telepathy – that is, the ability to perceive others’ thoughts, without having them communicated verbally or in writing. Others claim to have the power of clairvoyance, which is the ability to perceive events and objects that are hidden from view because of barriers or distance. Still others claim to be gifted with precognition, which enables them to look into the future and glimpse what hasn’t yet occurred.
The belief in ESP or the sixth sense dates back thousands of years. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that Croesus, who ruled a kingdom in what is now Turkey in the sixth century B.C., consulted oracles – that is, groups of priests claimed to be able to predict the future — before he went to war. In ancient India, Hindu holy men were believed to possess the power to see and hear at a distance, and to communicate through telepathy.
In the late 1700s, the Viennese physician Franz Mesmer claimed that he could give people ESP powers by hypnotizing them. Just before his assassination in 1865, President Abraham Lincoln told friends that he’d dreamed of his own body lying in state in the White House. In the 20th century, Edgar Cayce and Jean Dixon attracted wide followings by claiming that they could foresee future events. During the Cold War, U.S. military and intelligence agencies, spurred by reports that the Soviets had psychics at their disposal, even tried to utilize clairvoyants who claimed remote-viewing powers for espionage purposes.
As well as watching it directly from the Top Documentary Films website, it is also available from YouTube. Here are the four links. It is a most fascinating review of the scientific findings in this area. If you have a dog with you when you watch the videos, don’t be surprised if he or she fall asleep! Nothing new for dogs in all this!
Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, the host of the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at Caltech, and Adjunct Professor at Claremont Graduate University.
Finally, Joe Keohane (with thanks to Tom M. for the intro.)
Joe wrote a fascinating article that appeared in the Boston Globe last July that opens,
How facts backfire
Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains
It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.
This is a very smart article and much recommended, do read it fully here.
This coming next couple of weeks is going to see me reflecting on some of the powerful messages that flow from three one-hour documentaries by Adam Curtis during a series of programmes for the BBC in 2007.
For today, just enjoy the BBC trailer. (Assuming ‘enjoy’ is the right expression!)
I love taking photographs but this takes the cake!
(Note: there’s an option in WordPress to insert a ‘read more‘ link, the effect of which is to limit what you, dear reader, can see when you first come to a Blog article. I prefer normally not to insert that link. But for reasons that will soon be very obvious, it has to be used in this Post.)
I am indebted to my life-long friend, Dan Gomez, for this piece.
Background (Personal nostalgia warning!!!)
Dan and I go back too many years; I mean way too many! He and I met in Spring 1979 when I was addressing a national conference of US Commodore PC dealers in Boston, USA. I was there to promote a British Word Processing program called Wordcraft, written by Peter Dowson, that I had exclusive rights to. I was also a Commodore PC dealer in Colchester, Essex, England; indeed I was the 8th dealer appointed in the UK. The luck in finding Wordcraft is underlined by the fact that between 1970 and 1978 I was a salesman with IBM UK Office Products division and ended up as a word-processing specialist salesman for IBM.
Anyway, in my sales pitch to these US dealers, I used the word ‘fortnight’, a common term in England. From somewhere out in the audience, this Californian voice shouted out, “Hey Handover, what’s a fortnight?” Many readers will be aware that Americans don’t use that term. That Californian voice was Dan!
From that cheeky start came a great relationship including Dan being my West Coast distributor for Wordcraft. It was Dan’s sister, whom I have also known for countless years, who invited me to her Winter home in San Carlos, Mexico, to spend Christmas 2007 with her and her husband and which was the catalyst of me meeting Jean, who is now by most beautiful wife!
Dan, my Best Man, at the wedding of Jean and me, November 20th 2010
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OK, to the theme of this article.
Shortly after the Newsweek ‘Weather Panic‘ article on the 10th, Dan sent me this email,
Paul – Saw your blog vis a vis Newsweek’s recent cover.
Don’t forget to publish the other side of this perennial story without all the sensationalism of selling newspapers and proselytizing to the unwashed masses or you could end up drinking your own cool-aid. The science of weather cycles, sun activity, ocean currents, high-altitude jet streams, colliding warm/cool fronts have been at work long before any creature walked the earth, let alone man. The facts demonstrate this time and time again. Good science is skeptical science and needs to be viewed carefully by way of verifiable and constant testing of hypotheses.
The below article, although not at all sexy, has a different view, in general, as to the vagaries of weather extremes. There are many like this and represent unbiased, and to some, unpopular scientific reasoning at work.
Just food for thought.
–DG
He then included this.
Recent Weather Extremes: Global Warming Fingerprint Not
by Chip Knappenberger
March 21, 2011
On occasion, I have the opportunity to assist Dr. Patrick J. Michaels (Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies at the Cato Institute) in reviewing the latest scientific research on climate change. When we happen upon findings in the peer-reviewed scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press, Pat sometimes covers them over at the “Current Wisdom” section of the Cato@Liberty blog site.
His latest posting there highlights research findings that show that extreme weather events during last summer and the previous two winters can be fully explained by natural climate variability—and that “global warming” need not (and should not) be invoked.
This topic—whether or not weather extremes (or at least some portion of them) can be attributed to anthropogenic global warming (or, as Dr. Pielke Sr., prefers, anthropogenic climate change)—has been garnering a lot of attention as of late. It was a major reason for holding the House Subcommittee hearing last week, is a hot topic of discussion in the press, and is the subject of an in-progress major report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
A new paper by Randall Dole and colleagues from the Physical Sciences Division (PSD) of the Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) examined the events leading up to and causing the big heat wave in Russia last summer (which was also part of an atmospheric pattern that was connected to the floods in Pakistan). Here is what they found:
“Our analysis points to a primarily natural cause for the Russian heat wave. This event appears to be mainly due to internal atmospheric dynamical processes that produced and maintained an intense and long-lived blocking event. Results from prior studies suggest that it is likely that the intensity of the heat wave was further increased by regional land surface feedbacks. The absence of long-term trends in regional mean temperatures and variability together with the [climate] model results indicate that it is very unlikely that warming attributable to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations contributed substantially to the magnitude of this heat wave.”
As Pat commented, “Can’t be much clearer than that.”
Recent Winter Severity
From Pat’s article:
Another soon-to-be released paper to appear in Geophysical Research Lettersdescribes the results of using the seasonal weather prediction model from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) to help untangle the causes of the unusual atmospheric circulation patterns that gave rise to the harsh winter of 2009-2010 on both sides of the Atlantic. A team of ECMWF scientists led by Thomas Jung went back and did experiments changing initial conditions that were fed into the ECMWF model and then assessed how well the model simulated the known weather patterns of the winter of 2009-2010. The different set of initial conditions was selected so as to test all the pet theories behind the origins of the harsh winter. Jung et al. describe their investigations this way: “Here, the origin and predictability of the unusual winter of 2009/10 are explored through numerical experimentation with the ECMWF Monthly forecasting system. More specifically, the role of anomalies in sea surface temperature (SST) and sea ice, the tropical atmospheric circulation, the stratospheric polar vortex, solar insolation and near surface temperature (proxy for snow cover) are examined.”
In a nutshell, here is what Jung et al. found:
“The results of this study, therefore, increase the likelihood that both the development and persistence of negative NAO phase [an atmospheric circulation pattern that was largely behind the harsh winter conditions] resulted from internal atmospheric dynamical processes.”
Or, as Pat put it “Translation: Random variability.”
Pat also examined a third study by Roseanne D’Arrigo and colleagues who found an historical analog of the conditions responsible for the harsh winter of 2009-2010 way back in 1783-1784. The winter of 1783-1784 was a historically extreme one on both sides of the Atlantic and has long been associated with a large volcanic eruption that occurred in Iceland during the summer of 1783. Even Benjamin Franklin connected the winter conditions to the volcano. But D’Arrigo and colleagues now suggest a different mechanism. According to Pat:
But in their new study, Roseanne D’Arrigo and colleagues conclude that the harshness of that winter primarily was the result of anomalous atmospheric circulation patterns that closely resembled those observed during the winter of 2009-10, and that the previous summer’s volcanic eruption played a far less prominent role:
“Our results suggest that Franklin and others may have been mistaken in attributing winter conditions in 1783-4 mainly to Laki or another eruption, rather than unforced variability.
“Similarly, conditions during the 2009-10 winter likely resulted from natural [atmospheric] variability, not tied to greenhouse gas forcing… Evidence thus suggests that these winters were linked to the rare but natural occurrence of negative NAO and El Niño events.”
Bottom Line
The take home message of Pat’s post is worth repeating:
The point is that natural variability can and does produce extreme events on every time scale, from days (e.g., individual storms), weeks (e.g., the Russian heat wave), months (e.g., the winter of 2009-10), decades (e.g., the lack of global warming since 1998), centuries (e.g., the Little Ice Age), millennia (e.g., the cycle of major Ice Ages), and eons (e.g., snowball earth).
Folks would do well to keep this in mind next time global warming is being posited for the weather disaster du jour. Almost assuredly, it is all hype and little might.
Be sure to check out Pat’s full article which includes much more in depth coverage of these three soon-to-be-released scientific studies.
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I need to mull over this when I am back home with more time. In the meantime, comments from readers most welcomed.
Last Friday (10th) I wrote about a recent article that appeared in the Newsweek magazine of June 6th and mused about there seeming to be a growing awareness of the changing of the Planet Earth.
I just wanted to add a few other important elements (pardon the pun) of the current awareness.
First, at the time of writing this (June 2nd) the website that shows the monthly level of CO2 in the atmosphere was still showing the figure for April. Here it is,
CO2 in the atmosphere
Go here and check out what it is for May 2011. We all know that it won’t be below 393.18, which is already over 12% above the maximum safe level that scientists have determined.
UPDATE (June 7th): The figures for May are now on the website CO2 Now and they are 394.35 up, as predicted, from the figure of 393.18 for April, 2011.
Then go and watch this, from Bill McKibben,
Then go to the CO2 Now website and read, and ponder and think about what is becoming increasingly obvious to us all.
Finally, read a article that Bill McKibben has recently written that seems to have been widely published. Here it is on the TomDispatch website. It starts thus,
Three Strikes and You’re Hot
Time for Obama to Say No to the Fossil Fuel Wish List
By Bill McKibben
In our globalized world, old-fashioned geography is not supposed to count for much: mountain ranges, deep-water ports, railroad grades — those seem so nineteenth century. The earth is flat, or so I remember somebody saying.
But those nostalgic for an earlier day, take heart. The Obama administration is making its biggest decisions yet on our energy future and those decisions are intimately tied to this continent’s geography. Remember those old maps from your high-school textbooks that showed each state and province’s prime economic activities? A sheaf of wheat for farm country? A little steel mill for manufacturing? These days in North America what you want to look for are the pickaxes that mean mining, and the derricks that stand for oil.
Yes, it all seems ‘doom and gloom’ around us at present but then consider that the only way we, as in mankind, can change to a truly sustainable relationship with this Planet is through better understanding and a global realisation that the time for change is now! That is a very positive message!
Having now been living in Arizona for 18 months, I can say with some degree of certainty that there are few British things that I miss. One of them is draft English beer, of course, but another one is the BBC. Luckily modern internet technology means that quite a few of the great BBC television programmes ‘leak’ outside the UK.
The BBC Horizon science series has been one such example of a really well-produced programme.
Recently, a BBC Horizon programme about genetically modified (GM) foods aired by the BBC found its way onto YouTube and thence to the website Top Documentary Films. Not only is it an interesting programme but it also reveals how the facts of new advances in science are often difficult to understand by us; the general public.
The link to the film on the TDF website is here but if you want to watch it directly from YouTube then here it is.
Learning from Dogs 