What are continents?

as regards our conversation earlier about whether ecosystems are "real" . . . or whether species exist . . . or whether many of our other world-organizing concepts make sense, here we have a video that asks the question, "What are continents?"

enjoy.

Darwin Days

This is the event I mentioned in class. All the fun stuff is still left, so you should join in. Hope to see you at one of the events. 
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Feb12/DarwinDays2012.html


Here is a list of the events.

Feb. 12, "The Present and Future of Climate Change," lecture by Thomas Lovejoy, president of The H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment and founder of the PBS program "Nature," 5 p.m., Kaufmann Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall.

Feb. 13, "Adaption and Extinction in the Wake of Climate Change," panel discussion chaired by Robert Ross with panelists Warren Allmon, Gregory Dietl, Charles Greene and Drew Harvell, 5 p.m., 158 Goldwin Smith Hall.

Feb. 14, "Climate Change and Our Gardens, Farms and Natural Landscapes," panel discussion chaired by David Wolfe with panelists Jonathan Comstock, Larry Chase and Joseph Yavitt, 5 p.m., 162 Goldwin Smith Hall.

Feb. 15, "Climate Change Past and Present": Thomas Cronin, geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, will illustrate the application of paleoclimate records to contemporary challenges in climate change research, 5 p.m., Kaufmann Auditorium, Goldwin Smith.

Feb. 15, Darwin Trivia Night, for those 21 and older, 8 p.m., Big Red Barn.

Feb. 16, "Local Climate Change's Effect on Hop Production," lecture with Steve Miller, New York state's first hop specialist followed by a beer tasting, 6 p.m., Big Red Barn.

Feb. 17, "Adapt Your Tail Off!" a party to ring in Darwin's birthday in evolutionary style. Evolve yourself a pair of wings, antlers, claws or a tail and wish Charles a happy birthday. Prizes for most advanced, most primitive and "you tried your best!" costumes. Free, 7-11 p.m., Big Red Barn.

Feb. 18, Darwin Days' Family Day, Museum of the Earth, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Masai persistence hunt

Here is a video of a Masai "persistence hunt," where the animal is pursued and hunted until it collapses from exhaustion, and then the hunter closes in and kills the animal.



I think one could make a moral argument that the loss of such a cultural activity--along with the attendant human knowledge and skills that it requires--would be a tragic cultural loss in many ways. Here is one example where the philosophical arguments of animal rights, environmental ethics, and cultural preservation collide.

It is interesting to note that in Australia--which resembles the Anglo-American philosophical "scene"--aboriginal rights and customs have been assiduously protected and honored. Not perfectly, I suppose, but on an institutional scale that I believe isn't found in many other countries.

Order bias

http://zoologycomic.com/?p=1235
Even with insects, we have a biased view towards different orders.

More arguments by analogy to slavery

In the "hard to make this stuff up" category: an article today in The Guardian titled "Once, men abused slaves. Now we abuse fossil fuels." Here's an excerpt:

In 2005, while teaching history at a French university, I was struck by the general disbelief among students that rational and sensitive human beings could ever hold others in bondage. Slavery was so obviously evil that slave-holders could only have been barbarians. My students could not entertain the idea that some slave-owners could have been genuinely blind to the harm they were doing.

At the same time, I was reading a book on climate change which noted how today's machinery – almost exclusively powered by fossil fuels like coal and oil – does the same work that used to be done by slaves and servants. "Energy slaves" now do our laundry, cook our food, transport us, entertain us, and do most of the hard work needed for our survival.

Intriguing similarities between slavery and our current dependence on fossil-fuel-powered machines struck me: both perform roughly the same functions in society (doing the hard and dirty work that no one wants to do), both were considered for a long time to be acceptable by the majority and both came to be increasingly challenged as the harm they caused became more visible.

You can read the rest of the article here.

The article has already generated a fair amount of commentary and criticism. Keith Kloor's blog post, "A Tortured Analogy," at Collide-a-scape is particularly good.

Thoughts, comments?

new book by Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

here's a video on the book I mentioned in class this morning. I'd be curious if any of you end up reading it and hearing what you think. thanks.

Insulin and Animal Rights

Since we are discussing animal rights today and next week, I couldn't resist at least mentioning a rather thorny  hiccup in the animal rights agenda: life sustaining medications that were originally discovered through animal testing. What can one say about medications like insulin, without which I personally would have been extinct some years ago? (Personal disclosure: I am a type 1 diabetic and require insulin to live). Some of you may be less familiar with the history of insulin and its original discovery. Below is an excerpt from an article written by Deepinder Brar here:

The biggest breakthrough came in 1921 when Frederick Banting and Charles Best conducted a series of experiments one summer in the laboratory of J.J. R. Macleod at the University of Toronto. Like Minkowski and von Mering, they showed that removing the pancreas from dogs made them diabetic.
Then they went a step further and painstakingly took fluid from healthy dogs' Islets of Langerhans, injected it into the diabetic dogs and restored them to normalcy - for as long as they had the extract.With the help of a biochemist colleague named J. B. Collip, they were then able to extract a reasonably pure formula of insulin from the pancreas of cattle from slaughterhouses.
In January, 1922, a diabetic teenager in a Toronto hospital named Leonard Thompson became the first person to receive an injection of insulin. He improved dramatically, and the news about insulin spread around the world like wildfire. For their work, Banting and Macleod received the Nobel Prize in Medicine the very next year, in 1923. Banting shared his part of the prize money with Best, and Macleod shared his with Collip.

So what to make of this? I shudder to think of the pain inflicted on all of the animals used for their pancreases in order that I and so many other diabetics might live, but at the end of the day I am grateful that it happened. How could I not be? What other cures for terminal illnesses might be found through animal testing alone? I'm not saying I'm pro-animal testing per se, but it is certainly difficult to feel authentic in extolling an animal rights ethic while simultaneously relying on something borne from such a brutal reliance upon animal lives.