Plants and Animals

Dr Paul Reddell, co-founder Dr Victoria Gordon and the EcoBiotics team, have discovered a rainforest plant that produces a possible cancer-fighting molecule.

Clinical trials of a previously untreatable type of cancer in horses have produced dramatic results: “The cancers were the size of a tennis ball to begin and following the injection of this drug have shrunk, died and then fallen out. Finally the skin around the tumour area has healed.”

As originally reported in the Cairns Post, Dr. Reddell said, “We are now looking to move the drug to testing against obstructive tumours and skin cancers in humans.”

Bio-discovery is emerging as an increasingly important and value-added attribute of bio-diversity, with important economic implications for conservation. In 2004, following the Commonwealth Government’s ratification of the ‘Convention on Biological Diversity’, the Queensland Government enacted its Bio-discovery Act, to facilitate access by biodiscovery entities to minimal quantities of native biological resources on or in State land or Queensland waters, to encourage the development, in the State, of value added biodiscovery and to ensure the State, for the benefit of all persons in the State, obtains a fair and equitable share in the benefits of biodiscovery..

A new study by a team of scientists specializing in zoology and animal health reported, “analyses found no evidence to support the hypothesis that climate change has been driving outbreaks of amphibian chytridiomycosis.”

The study was published in the peer-reviewed PLoS Biology, a journal of the Public Library of Science:

Riding the Wave: Reconciling the Roles of Disease and Climate Change in Amphibian Declines

Karen R. Lips1*, Jay Diffendorfer2, Joseph R. Mendelson III3, Michael W. Sears1

1 Department of Zoology, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois, United States of America, 2 Illinois Natural History Survey, Champaign, Illinois, United States of America, 3 Zoo Atlanta, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America

We review the evidence for the role of climate change in triggering disease outbreaks of chytridiomycosis, an emerging infectious disease of amphibians. Both climatic anomalies and disease-related extirpations are recent phenomena, and effects of both are especially noticeable at high elevations in tropical areas, making it difficult to determine whether they are operating separately or synergistically. We compiled reports of amphibian declines from Lower Central America and Andean South America to create maps and statistical models to test our hypothesis of spatiotemporal spread of the pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), and to update the elevational patterns of decline in frogs belonging to the genus Atelopus. We evaluated claims of climate change influencing the spread of Bd by including error into estimates of the relationship between air temperature and last year observed. Available data support the hypothesis of multiple introductions of this invasive pathogen into South America and subsequent spread along the primary Andean cordilleras. Additional analyses found no evidence to support the hypothesis that climate change has been driving outbreaks of amphibian chytridiomycosis, as has been posited in the climate-linked epidemic hypothesis. Future studies should increase retrospective surveys of museum specimens from throughout the Andes and should study the landscape genetics of Bd to map fine-scale patterns of geographic spread to identify transmission routes and processes.

Author Summary

Once introduced, diseases may spread quickly through new areas, infecting naive host populations, such as has been documented in Ebola virus in African primates or rabies in North American mammals. What drives the spread of the pathogenic fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), which causes chytridiomycosis, is of particular concern because it has contributed to the global decline of amphibians. We modeled the spatiotemporal pattern of the loss of upland amphibian populations in Central and South America as a proxy for the arrival of Bd and found that amphibian declines in Central and South America are best explained by Bd spreading through upland populations; we identified four separate introductions of Bd into South America. Climate change seriously threatens biodiversity and influences endemic host–pathogen systems, but we found no evidence that climate change has been driving outbreaks of chytridiomycosis, as has been posited in the climate-linked epidemic hypothesis. Our findings further strengthen the spreading-pathogen hypothesis proposed for Central America, and identify new evidence for similar patterns of decline in South American amphibians. Our results will inform management and research efforts related to Bd and other invasive species, as effective conservation actions depend on correctly identifying essential threats to biodiversity, and possible synergistic interactions.

Following is my review of ‘Science and Public Policy: The Virtuous Corruption of Virtual Environmental Science’ by Aynsley Kellow (Edward Elgar, 2007, 218 pages) as published in The IPA Review, May 2008 (Vol 59/4):

In 2000 the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) claimed a species of Cambodian mountain goat, Pseudonovibos sptraits, was endangered with a fragmented population of 2,500 mature individuals. The species was included in the 2003 and 2006 edition of the IUCN Red List of Threatend Species.

But the Pseudonovibos sptrails never existed.

Cambodian artisans had been fooling collectors for years by removing the sheath from the horns of domestic cattle, soaking them in vinegar, heating them in palm sugar and bamboo leaves before moulding and carving the horns and then selling them as wall mounts. There had been no sightings of the goats, and DNA analysis indicated the skull bones to be those of cattle, but the idea of a rare creature that needed saving captured the imagination of the local Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) program manager and he featured the IUCN listing in his fight against land mines and rainforest destruction.

In a new book Science and Public Policy: The Virtuous Corruption of Virtual Environmental Science Aynsley KeIlow, Professor and Head of the School of Government at the University of Tasmania, uses this and other case studies from conservation biology and climate science as examples of ‘noble cause corruption’. The phenomenon is recognised in law enforcement circles where police officers manufacture evidence to ensure a conviction.

The thesis of Kellow’s book is that noble cause corruption gives as much cause for concern about the reliability of science as the potential influence of money.

Kellow shows that noble cause corruption is rife in the environmental sciences, and he shows how the corruption is facilitated by the virtual nature of much of the science.

After opening with the somewhat comical example of the bogus listing of the mythical Cambodian mountain goat, Kellow gets into the history of conservation biology. He explains how in the early 1980s ecology lacked a scientifically respectable method for studying life. The ecosystem approach potentially provided scientific respectability by supplying ecologists with mathematical tools developed by physicists beginning with the species-area equation and the theory of island biogeography.

While the theory could explain the number of insect and arthropod species colonising 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 was not justified.

And 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.

It is this approach, in particular the dominance of mathematical models, which makes it possible for groups like Greenpeace to use figures of 50,000-100,000 species becoming extinct every year, with support from the scientific literature, when they would be hard pressed to provide evidence of any actual extinctions.

Furthermore, an ecosystem as Kellow explains 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 and migrating waterfowl.’

In Science and Public Policy, Kellow shows how the misguided approach to the complexity of ‘ecosystems’ facilitated the subsequent development of climate science as ‘post-normal’ science. Kellow begins by explaining that climate change is an area of science where models inevitably play an important role-there is little scope for laboratory experimentation.

Climate models are constructed using historical data and then tested against the same data. Until about 1996 they produced a warming climate even with constant carbon dioxide. It is a vast undertaking and many scientists involved in modelling future climates have to assume the results of others are correct, and so it becomes partly a construct-dealing with enormous complexity and nonlinear processes.

Furthermore, Kellow details how lapses in scientific standards have occurred-involving the misuse of statistics on emissions scenarios and the incorrect reinterpretation of tree-ring data- which have had the effect of conveniently contributing to the political case for action to mitigate climate change.

The second half of the book is very much about politics beginning with a detailed analysis of the campaign by scientists against statistician Bjorn Lomborg and his book The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World and following with a critique of why there seems to be a closer affinity between environmentalism and left-leaning parties in western democracies and greater hostility towards environmental protection from right-leaning parties.

Kellow argues that there are cultural factors associated with the appreciation of nature that align with political ideologies and that these factors become exaggerated by the now virtual nature of many scientific disciplines. This further facilitates the corruption of science and public policy.

Kellow disputes the claim that the rise of environmentalism simply reflects increasing affluence and a progressive agenda, and considers the history of environmentalism and the myth of the balance of nature in the context of a long tradition of Western thought often involving catastrophic decline from some idyllic past- usually as a result of sin.

The idea of the ‘balance of nature’ persists, even though it is not supported by the observational data, because, if we accept this myth, any change in ecosystems can be attributed to human activity and imparted with a deep social meaning.

Within this paradigm, ecology involves all manner of projections of human values onto observed nature including through the use of terms such as ‘invasive species’ and ‘alien’.

Quoting Robert Kirkman, Kellow suggests that a belief in ecologism provides a moral compass pointing in the direction of holistic harmony, but it is an illusion.

This shift of environmentalism onto a religious plane, coupled with the descent of much of ecology into the virtual world of mathematical modelling has seen the marriage of environmental science to political activism. Classic liberalism, Kellow explains, with its emphasis on separation between the individual and the state, can provide a protection against ‘the darker possibilities of environmentalism’.

The book ends with a warning to scientists to not usurp the role of policy-makers. But rather provide those policy-makers with informed choices.

Indeed public policy is almost never resolved by some piece of scientific information. When science is used to arbitrate it eventually loses its independent status and disqualifies itself.

Science and Public Policy is an important book as a philosophical and historical analysis of environmental activism particularly over the last 30 years.

It will be especially appreciated by naturalists and biologists who remember the good old days when tramping about in work boots observing wild goats at close range or, in my case, collecting live lepidopteron, was encouraged-that is, before the advent of environmental science and sitting at desks crunching numbers for computer models.

Jennifer Marohasy is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs.

You can buy the book here: http://www.amazon.com/Science-Public-Policy-Corruption-Environmental/dp/1847204708

Following my earlier post, in which I could tell you the face did not belong to a member of Australia’s legislature etcetera, well here is the full body: