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World's Plant Life Far Less Diverse Than Thought
Meshach writes "A report out of FOX News (I know, I know) says that there are far fewer unique species of plants than previously thought. The report states that only about a third of named species are actually unique. The rest have been 'discovered' multiple times, often by separate scientists."
right?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
The fact that existing discovered and named flora is redundant should not be too surprising. But the number that we have discovered has no bearing whatsoever on the amount or variety of undiscovered flora, at all. So a statement like "World's Plant Live Far Less Diverse Than Thought" is simply irresponsible. The former situation is simply not evidence of the latter. It has long been acknowledged that we have only formally "discovered" and categorized a small fraction of the Earth's actual diversity.
As far as i can tell as a non-american is that Fox News is a pretty lowly news outlet.
However that doesnt automaticly mean the story cant be true.
Just start assuming the opposite. "There are no duplicates within the millions of plants discovered." In a database of that size, with manually made entries for well over a 100 years, highly unlikely.
So, without further knowledge, one can only speculate about the percentage of duplicate entries.
As for Fox... I think it is worth following, in addition to a number of other sources. They definitely give a different selection of stories than less biased sources , but what they report is rarely flat-out false.
As for the Reader Comments on their story pages, and even the Opinion section, yeah, they're pretty out there.
That's almost by design. The Fox News bias is from the original founding idea: studies showed most vocal conservatives (as opposed to real conservatives) didn't want facts and didn't want to learn. They wanted to hear only what re-enforced their already limited and slanted viewpoints. It was consciously created with that in mind. Some of the "talent" involved have even made comments, off camera, at social events, like, "Oh, that's just the act, get over it," or, "It's what I do for a job, who believes that crap?"
Interestingly enough, surveys also show that those very same people, when presented with facts that disrupt or disprove what they want to believe will ignore those facts and will become even more emotionally entrenched and committed to what they want to believe is true - even after seeing proof it is false.
Considering how they ignore science when it's inconvenient to their agenda, like the recent memos on global warming, for example, they've shown they can intentionally distort science as much as they distort politics.
This really shouldn't come as much surprise. There are plenty of plants that look dramatically different at different stages of their life; if they were being "discovered" for the first time they could well be called different species. Add to that the differing languages spoken by different botanists when attempting to classify species and the problem grows very quickly.
And for that matter, with molecular biology our notion of "species" is changing as well. Now a species is defined more along the lines of a unique genome (or at least uniquely organized genome) than simply on where and how it grows. Now we realize that - especially in the plant kingdom - there are many pairings of different species of plants that can hybridize and produce viable offspring.
So indeed, the number was due to be corrected at some point. This happens in other sciences, too; a while ago a few species of dinosaurs were recently re-classified as likely being juvenile specimens of other species.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
But http://www.theplantlist.org/ quotes their data right on the front page:
Accepted 298,900 28.7%
Synonym 477,601 45.9%
Unresolved 263,925 25.4%
Note that a full 25% could go either way. Fox is putting the predictable spin on the story that ALL news media will probably put on this to generate readership, but the takeaway is that now we know more. This is generally considered a good a thing, especially when you want to do this sort of thing repeatedly. They have a method, and are looking to expand and perfect it. Mission accomplished.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
You mean Fox News is real?! I thought it was just a parody invented by the Daily Show. We get the "International Edition" of that here, and they show clips of Fox. ... it is just a joke, right?
C'mon
No, a news organization can't have a view point and still be a news organization.
So, you are saying that there are no news organizations, and never have been any.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Well, there's a lot of details from the actual source of the study that are left out of the Fox News report. Like the fact that they used a taxonomic knowledge in a rulebase to reduce the set of unique plants. While fascinating, one must wonder how well an automated system could perform such a feat. Note: The part about putting "discovered" in double quotes is not found in the original source article but arises in the Fox News article. You might want to be careful as you could be insinuating gross incompetence in the field of botany across its entire history. It's also possible that this algorithm for reducing the list needs to be worked on.
My work here is dung.
>I'll make you a deal. I'll support a ban on submissions from Fox News as long as we never have to see another submission from MSNBC, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, or anything similar.
None of those media news outlets have gone to court, though, to argue that their right to deliberately lie to and consciously mislead their readership is protected by the First Amendment.
http://www.relfe.com/media_can_legally_lie.html
That, to me, says cease using Fox News as a source (and burn it with fire).
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
This doesn't inherently discredit them as a news organization
No, the fact they filed and won a lawsuit arguing that they are allowed to deliberately lie about the news does.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Climate is not chaotic in the mathematical sense until you get into geologic time scales that are long enough to negate the regulating influence of the Milankovich cycles (ie: millions of years). Weather is chaotic on timescales of days.
You can see the same mathematical concept in a pan of water on the stove, you can make a usefully accurate model to predict how long it will take to boil but there is no way to predict when or where the first bubble will start to form.
Climate model forecasts of climate trend (particularly golbal average temps) have matched observations within their defined error margin for over 30yrs now.
Since this stuff is so easy to google I can only assume you haven't tried answering your own question.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
What if instead of linking to news source third party slashdot linked to THIS: http://www.theplantlist.org/
Would 50% of the post be discussing the third party news source instead of the real news. I don't even think the news is the spin of the third party (which was, "Look! Scientists have goofed an estimate!" (One that will alway be a moving target, in this case the plant count)). I think the real news is this: There is a group working to create an open, coordinated effort to prevent the very thing that the triple-faced thirdy party is spinning negatively.
In other news, post is now both the plurar and singular form of the word "post".