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Scientists Create a "Worth Saving" Index For Endangered Animals
If you're one of the last hairy-nosed-wombats left in Australia things got a little worse for you today. Thanks to a new mathematical tool created by researchers from James Cook University and the University of Adelaide, the wombat has been classified as not worth saving. Co-author of the safe index Professor Corey Bradshaw says he doesn't think people should give up on saving extremely endangered animals but adds, "...if you take a strictly empirical view, things that are well below in numbering in the hundreds - white-footed rock rats, certain types of hare wallabies, a lot of the smaller mammals that have been really nailed by the feral predators like cats, and foxes - in some cases it is probably not worthwhile putting a lot of effort because there's just no chance."
I know it's not very politically-correct to say it, but I don't think we should be trying to save every species. The prevailing assumption today seems to be that mankind is causing every extinction on the planet and, as such, we should be working to save every species and variety of endangered animal. Even ignoring that fact that mankind is part of nature too, extinction is a natural process that was taking place long before we existed. It seems to me that a world where species DON'T go extinct (thanks to our efforts) would disrupt the natural processes of evolution. Our guilt complex could create a very unnatural world.
And for the record, I think Pandas are cute. But they're not exactly a hearty lot.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Can I propose the arbuscular mychorrhizal fungi for protection? Not sure what it is, but it was the first thing to pop up when I typed 'endangered microorganism' in Google.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/cx815t3578004x20/
-- New business idea: endangered species marketing strategy consultant
Professor Corey Bradshaw was assassinated by PETA agents for daring to imply that any animal was less important than any human. Their press release states that any other scientists that dare to put the survival of the hated human race above the that of the least important member of the animal kingdom would be similarly put to death.
Look at how much money is spent on the Great Panda, a species that has no habitat to be returned to even if we could somehow boost it's population up to sustainable levels. If you really want to save as many endangered species as possible you would spend the money elsewhere. The same is true for many species; their habitats are gone, their food source evaporated, the populations well below the number required to prevent genetic drift, but we spend millions of dollars on them. That money could be better spent on animals that haven't yet slid past the point of no return.
I never really thought of it that way. You may bring up an interesting dichotomy: My general impression is that most most animal preservation activists tend to be evolutionists, even though evolutionists should believe that extinction is a natural part of the evolutionary cycle. On the other hand, religionists tend to believe that we should do our best to preserve every creature the deity created, but my impression is they tend to have more lax environmental policy.
I'm not suggesting causal relationships between evolutionists and preservationist or religionists and lax environmental policy, just that they seem to be somewhat correlated--by geography if nothing else.
At one point, the Smallpox variola virus was almost completely wiped out, surviving only in a few laboratories around the world.
Now, thanks to the efforts of some people who were able to free some of those remaining captive virus, it may someday be possible to reintroduce them into the wild, allowing them to once again freely complete in nature.
Won't that be nice? Another endangered species brought back from the brink of extinction.
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
its WRONG to say it.
if you have a problem, you fix it. its as simple as that. when you go into calculations of 'worth' as if your biosphere was a business venture, the 'not worth' you have 'not saved' comes bites you in the ass due to chain reactions in biosphere.
i see that as an ill that capitalist mindset brought to our civilization - we are seeing everything from a window of 'cost/benefit'. not surprisingly, just like how economies come crashing down due to extreme adherence to these cost/benefit perspectives.there are too many variables that even the most foresighted analyst, the most complex computer forecasting cannot see and prepare for. ecosystems are no different - they are objects that are formed by inherently interrelated infinite number of elements.
there are areas in life where you should leave nothing to chance. the ecosystem you live in, is one of them.
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This is basically triage for endangered species. As hard as it is, you don't want to waste your time on someone with a likely irreparable mortal wound when you have five others that might be saved if they are given priority.
And since we know every possible effect the existence (or extinction) of an animal has to the ecosystem, we can sensibly make that list in the first place.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not worth saving.
Nope, he's been experimenting with the LSD.
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I think there can be a lot of interesting argument where morality and rationality intersect. It can depend largely upon how you interpret morality.
Using your example of rape. If some random stranger is raped, immediately I may not care. But the person who raped the original victim could then go on to rape my sister, or someone else could see that rape has no consequences and rape my sister. The emotion impact would then mean that I would have to support my sister, or that she would be unable to support me. Preventing the original rape then becomes a matter of self interest.
Referring to endangered animals: we can probably agree that preventing animals from going extinct is a largely moral goal, and saving more animals is even more moral. Unfortunately, we do not have unlimited resources to save every animal there is, so directing some of our resources toward and animal that may have little to no chance of surviving anyway would reduce the available resources for other animals, potentially leading to them becoming extinct - an immoral action.
I think a lot of this comes from humans evolution as social animals, moral actions help the whole group of people, and largely serve the purposes of the individual. People often bag on religion as deciding the moral code, but atheist morality puts a lot of this stuff in terms of helping other people, which will eventually serve your own interest.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
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No, not really. A cow would actually have the digestive tract that can break down cellulose walls and extract a lot more nutrient from that bamboo. A panda is more like an overgrown carnivore, with a carnivore digestive tract, which eats bamboo, and shits most of it undigested.
It gets extremely little protein or energy per pound eaten, and in fact ridiculously so. It has to spend most of its day eating, and avoid moving too much or too fast, or it will literally starve to death. It can't even walk up more than very gentle slopes, because it just doesn't have the energy budget for that. Chasing prey or running away from a predator is right out.
Even the low reproduction rate may well have to do with just not having the energy or protein to produce or feed larger litters. It has nothing to do with some clever design that protects the environment (there isn't any conceivable evolutionary pressure that takes that into account), but simply with the fact that it's so piss-poor at feeding itself, that it just can't do more than a cub in a blue moon.
Truth is, it's not very fit, in the survival of the fittest sense, and it doesn't have an isolated niche like the animals in Australia had. I mean, it is isolated by mountains and deserts, which posed a barrier to other species coming in, but it's not nearly as insurmountable as thousands of miles of ocean are. In the wild, it would be only a matter of time before some predator evolves or manages to get over the mountains to fill the niche of feeding on all those juicy pandas, or some bigger herbivore comes to out-compete them.
It's also a very new species, at evolution scales. The earliest thing even remotely recognizable as a panda lived some three million years ago (though the intermediate links evolving in that direction are, obviously, older.) By way of comparison, our split between us and chimps is 6 million years ago.
It's too early to say it would be such a viable species without us.
And either way, it was a piss-poor species which existed there just by virtue of being isolated from either predators or prey or competing species. It's a carnivore who had to start eating bamboo just for lack of prey, never got any good at it, and survived in that niche only for lack of competition. In a sense, it was already living in a natural zoo, and it would become extinct within decades of those barriers around it failing in any way.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.