Archives for February 2008

Dynamism is a new label for a new political philosophy, a philosophy that Virginia Postrel explains in her 1998 book, ‘The Future and Its Enemies – The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress’, has given us greater wealth, opportunity and choice than at any time in history.

According to Postrel many conservatives and social liberals (members of the right and left of politics) have much in common as they want to control the future while Dynamists believe in the capacity of human beings to improve their lives through trial and error, spontaneous adjustment, adaptation and evolution.

That’s some of what I wrote in Part 1, of ‘Why I am a Dynamist’. I thought some of the comments in the thread that followed were interesting with Gavin suggesting that “dynamic change could lead to chaos.”

It is worth remembering, the evolution of life on earth has been a dynamic process with no-one in control and yet it has not lead to chaos.

Dynamists see the same potential in human enterprise provided there is a reliable foundation on which to build complex, ever-adapting structures that incorporate local knowledge.

Postrel suggests that some of those structures will be elaborate new schemes of rules:

“But the rules will be voluntarily subscribed to, allowed to evolve, and able to incorporate detailed knowledge of particulars. … and they should not be confused with the fundamental rules that, in fact, allow such specific-purpose rules to develop.”

Postrel suggests that respect for local knowledge and rules can avoid the tragedy of the commons:

“Grazing land and fishing sites are classic examples of commons. Economic theory predicts that such common property will be overused, since everyone has an incentive to draw as much as possible from it rather than to conserve. But Elinor Ostrom [Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge University Press, 1990] finds many examples of cooperative institutions evolving to regulate commons use effectively, to everyone’s benefit … developed through trial-and-error learning, with the rules made by the same people who must abide them.”

About 250 million year ago, during the late Permian the world’s oceans stagnated causing a huge and lethal build up of hydrogen sulphide produced by anaerobic bacteria. Up to 95 percent of marine species and 85 percent of those on the land went extinct.

At least that is the view of Peter Ward writing in last week’s issue of New Scientist (Precambian strikes back, February 9, 2008)

The oceans stagnated because global warming from massive emissions of greenhouse gases from sustained volcanic eruptions warmed the high latitudes more than the equator, slowing the ocean currents.

A reader of this weblog, Dr Steve Short, recommends everyone read the article:

“This subject is not only close to my personal interests (as a geochemist) but raises some very interesting issues I have been mulling over for some years about the immense significance of the ‘partnership’ which actually applies on Earth between oxygen-breathing animal life and the oxygen-creating and CO2-absorbing cyanobacteria and plant kingdoms and the roles of methanogens and sulfur reducing bacteria.

I am coming round to the view that this is the real paradigm which the human race needs to embrace in order to manage issues such as AGW (if it actually exists) and (perhaps more importantly) the levels of dissolved CO2 and O2 in the surface layers of the ocean and the sustainability of the continental plant biomass.

Realization of this over-arching paradigm has deep implications for how we look at coal, oil and gas, how we may re-create it sustainably, how we manage our partnership with the oceanic cyanobacteria, the sea floor methanogens and continental plants in a truly intelligent and symbiotic way.

In my view this article might almost be classed as seminal, so profound are the issues which it raises in a popular science context.”

How many plant and animal species go extinct each year?

Some years ago Greenpeace claimed 50,000 -100,000 species each year.

In the comment thread of an earlier blog post Lamna nasus suggested a figure of 90 species of mammal over the past five centuries.

Professor Aynsley Kellow in his new book ‘Science and Public Policy – The Virtuous Corruption of Virtual Environmental Science’ describes the Greenpeace figure of 50,000 – 100,000 species as “virtual reality” made possible by mathematical modelling.

Professor Kellow links the Greenpeace claims, to the modelling of a so-called species-area relationship dependent on the idea that ecosystems are self-regulating and tend towards equilibrium.

Quotable quotes include:

“Ecology lacked a scientifically respectable method for studying life, and the ecosystem approach provided scientific respectability by supplying ecologists with mathematical tools developed by physicists.”

“An ecosystem is nothing more than a construction… Ecologists tried to study ponds as examples of ecosystems, but soon found even they were not closed systems but connected to the watertable, and affected by groundwater flows, spring run-off, migrating waterfowl…”

Professor Kellow goes on to explain the origin of the species-area equation and the theory of island biogeography as developed by Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson. While the theory can explain the number of insect and arthropod species colonizing mangrove islands off the coast of Florida as a function of their distance from the mainland, the theory’s extrapolation to non-island situations and terrestrial ecology more generally is questionable. Furthermore predicting species loss by extrapolating backwards to suggest, for example, that a reduction in the area of forest will produce the same rate of species reduction as does its growth, has no basis in observational data but is common practice in conservation biology.

More quotable quotes include:

“In the absence of hypotheses which might be falsified by observational data, the extensive use of mathematical models introduces a virtual landscape where species, real and virtual, live and die, and where their utility to noble political causes restricts the scepticism of those who might question the validity of such ‘science’.

“Endangered species become not just trumps, but face cards in the game of politics used to create advantage.”

“The increased emphasis on mathematics which lent ecology its scientific gravitas helped steer it towards virtual science rather than experimental science, and it never shook off its normative shackles.”

“It perhaps became too abstract, a discipline attracting deskbound number crunchers more than those who liked to tramp about the woods in wool shirts counting deer scat.” [Kellow quoting Alton Chase]

“Wilson obviously finds beauty in nature, which is all very well, but to privilege this above other human needs as measured by opportunity cost is undoubtedly elitist and inherently anti-humanist.”

“There are, of course, all sorts of objections that can be raised against this virtual science. One fundamental problem is that it is based on the erroneous notion of ecosystem stability, since equilibrium lies at both the base of the theory and in the prescriptive concern with ecosystem maintenance.”