Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Weekend Contributor
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist and director of the Natural History Museum’s Hayden Planetarium in New York City. He is also the host of Fox Networks’ new science series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. Last Sunday, Tyson appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources program and spoke with Brian Stelter. During the program, Tyson talked about “the hypocrisy of people dismissing scientific theory while simultaneously embracing the fruits of scientific discovery ‘that we so take for granted today.’”
Tyson said that our civilization “is built on the innovation of scientists and technologists and engineers who have shaped everything that we so take for granted today. So some of the science deniers or science haters, these are people who are telling that to you while they are on their mobile phone. They are saying, ‘I don’t like science. Oh, GPS just told us to go left. So it’s time for people to sit back and reassess what role science has actually played in our lives. And learn how to embrace that going forward, because without it, we will just regress back into the caves.”
Stelter asked Tyson if he felt that the news media should feel a responsibility to portray science correctly—especially with regard to controversial issues such as climate change. Tyson said he thought the news media was wrong to give equal time to the “flat-earthers.” He thinks the media “should stop trying to ‘balance’ the debate on scientific issues by hosting people who deny science.”
Tyson said, “The media has to sort of come out of this ethos that I think was in principle a good one, but it doesn’t really apply in science. The principle was, whatever story you give, you have to give the opposing view. And then you can be viewed as balanced.” He continued, “You don’t talk about the spherical Earth with NASA, and then say let’s give equal time to the flat Earthers. Plus, science is not there for you to cherry pick.”
Tyson added, “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it. Alright? I guess you can decide whether or not to believe in it, but that doesn’t change the reality of an emergent scientific truth.”
The great American science divide (CNN)
Recently, Tyson spoke about the new version of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Tyson said that science and religion should not be painted as being “diametrically opposed to each other.” He said there were many scientists who believe in God. He added, “The issue there is not religion versus non-religion or religion versus science, the issue there is ideas that are different versus dogma.”
Tyson explained, “If you start using your scripture, your religious text as a source of your science, that’s where you run into problems, and there is no example of someone reading their scripture and saying ‘I have a prediction about the world that no one knows yet because this gave me insight.’” He continued, “Enlightened religious people know this, and don’t try to use the Bible as a textbook.”
Chris Mooney of Mother Jones said that Tyson has emphasized that the stance of the science series Cosmos is anti-dogma—not anti-religion. Tyson was quoted as saying, “Any time you have a doctrine where that is the truth that you assert, and that what you call the truth is unassailable, you’ve got doctrine, you’ve got dogma on your hands. And so Cosmos is…an offering of science, and a reminder that dogma does not advance science; it actually regresses it.”
Katie Valentine of ThinkProgress noted that Tyson had spoken previously “about the need for the public to accept scientific facts rather than the talking points of politicians.” According to Valentine, the astrophysicist said in 2011 that climate change deniers should “be mature enough to recognize something can be true even if you don’t like the consequences of it. That’s what it means to be a mature adult.” Valentine also reported that while appearing on CNN in February, Tyson said that “he hopes America doesn’t wait until climate change has drastically changed the Earth’s landscape to realize that our policies haven’t done enough to prepare us.”
Tyson said that he doesn’t know what to say “when politicians start analyzing the science. “Are we going to wait until the coastlines get redrawn as the glaciers melt off of Antarctica and Greenland?”
Good question, Mr. Tyson, good question.
SOURCES
Neil deGrasse Tyson tells CNN: Stop giving ‘equal time to the flat Earthers’ (Raw Story)
Neil DeGrasse Tyson To Science Deniers: ‘Science Is Not There For You To Cherry Pick’ (ThinkProgress)
Neil DeGrasse Tyson: ‘Enlightened Religious People Don’t Use The Bible As A Textbook’ (Huffington Post)
Some folks have almost as many aliases as they do lies.
Are you everyone, Queen of Narcissus.
Al Gore invented the Internet as we know it today. That is settled. What’s unsettling, is Nicky Spasmatics attack on people.
Who keeps using the word “settled?” I haven’t used it once.
Much of what is now accepted science, particularly in medicine, was once considered pseudoscience. Again, there is no “settled” science, accept in Al Gore’s groupie cult.
Is that MASTER’S DEGREE from a Jesuit University in climate science? The witness should consider themself still under oath.
Global Warming Skeptics Meet “The Climateers!”
And no one wants to shut down anyone’s free speech here, instead I think I can safely say climate change deniers can spout pseudoscience until the cows come home, others are free to disagree with the pseudoscience.
annie – you are in denial. The very use of the terms you use to describe your opponents means you are both trying to marginalize them and censor them. At least have the intellectually honesty to admit it.
“Not” would be the optimal word here.
7 ways to shut down a climate change denier
Comprehensive rebuttals to contrarians’ pseudo-scientific explanations why global warming is just a myth
John Rennie, Scientific American
12/18/13
http://www.salon.com/2013/12/18/7_ways_to_shut_down_a_climate_change_denier_partner/
Excerpt:
On November 18, with the United Nations Global Warming Conference in Copenhagen fast approaching, U.S. Sen. James R. Inhofe (R–Okla.) took the floor of the Senate and proclaimed 2009 to be “The Year of the Skeptic.” Had the senator’s speech marked a new commitment to dispassionate, rational inquiry, a respect for scientific thought and a well-grounded doubt in ghosts, astrology,creationism and homeopathy, it might have been cause for cheer. But Inhofe had a more narrow definition of skeptic in mind: he meant “standing up and exposing the science, the costs and the hysteria behind global warming alarmism.”
Within the community of scientists and others concerned about anthropogenic climate change, those whom Inhofe calls skeptics are more commonly termed contrarians, naysayers and denialists. Not everyone who questions climate change science fits that description, of course—some people are genuinely unaware of the facts or honestly disagree about their interpretation. What distinguishes the true naysayers is an unwavering dedication to denying the need for action on the problem, often with weak and long-disproved arguments about supposed weaknesses in the science behind global warming.
What follows is only a partial list of the contrarians’ bad arguments and some brief rebuttals of them.
Claim 1: Anthropogenic CO2 can’t be changing climate, because CO2 is only a trace gas in the atmosphere and the amount produced by humans is dwarfed by the amount from volcanoes and other natural sources.Water vapor is by far the most important greenhouse gas, so changes in CO2 are irrelevant.
Although CO2 makes up only 0.04 percent of the atmosphere, that small number says nothing about its significance in climate dynamics. Even at that low concentration, CO2 absorbs infrared radiation and acts as a greenhouse gas, as physicist John Tyndall demonstrated in 1859. The chemist Svante Arrhenius went further in 1896 by estimating the impact of CO2 on the climate; after painstaking hand calculations he concluded that doubling its concentration might cause almost 6 degrees Celsius of warming—an answer not much out of line with recent, far more rigorous computations.
Contrary to the contrarians, human activity is by far the largest contributor to the observed increase in atmospheric CO2. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, anthropogenic CO2 amounts to about 30 billion tons annually—more than 130 times as much as volcanoes produce. True, 95 percent of the releases of CO2 to the atmosphere are natural, but natural processes such as plant growth and absorption into the oceans pull the gas back out of the atmosphere and almost precisely offset them, leaving the human additions as a net surplus. Moreover, several sets of experimental measurements, including analyses of the shifting ratio of carbon isotopes in the air, further confirm that fossil-fuel burning and deforestation are the primary reasons that CO2 levels have risen 35 percent since 1832, from 284 parts per million (ppm) to 388 ppm—a remarkable jump to the highest levels seen in millions of years.
Contrarians frequently object that water vapor, not CO2, is the most abundant and powerful greenhouse gas; they insist that climate scientists routinely leave it out of their models. The latter is simply untrue: from Arrhenius on, climatologists have incorporated water vapor into their models. In fact, water vapor is why rising CO2 has such a big effect on climate. CO2 absorbs some wavelengths of infrared that water does not so it independently adds heat to the atmosphere. As the temperature rises, more water vapor enters the atmosphere and multiplies CO2′s greenhouse effect; the IPCC notes that water vapor (pdf) may “approximately double the increase in the greenhouse effect due to the added CO2 alone.”
Nevertheless, within this dynamic, the CO2 remains the main driver (what climatologists call a “forcing”) of the greenhouse effect. As NASA climatologistGavin Schmidt has explained, water vapor enters and leaves the atmosphere much more quickly than CO2, and tends to preserve a fairly constant level of relative humidity, which caps off its greenhouse effect. Climatologists therefore categorize water vapor as a feedback rather than a forcing factor. (Contrarians who don’t see water vapor in climate models are looking for it in the wrong place.)
Because of CO2′s inescapable greenhouse effect, contrarians holding out for a natural explanation for current global warming need to explain why, in their scenarios, CO2 is not compounding the problem.
Claim 2: The alleged “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past 1,600 years has been disproved. It doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of a “medieval warm period” around 1000 A.D. that was hotter than today is. Therefore, global warming is a myth.
It is hard to know which is greater: contrarians’ overstatement of the flaws in thehistorical temperature reconstruction from 1998 by Michael E. Mann and his colleagues, or the ultimate insignificance of their argument to the case for climate change.
First, there is not simply one hockey-stick reconstruction of historical temperatures using one set of proxy data. Similar evidence for sharply increasing temperaturesover the past couple of centuries has turned up independently while looking at ice cores, tree rings and other proxies for direct measurements, from many locations. Notwithstanding their differences, they corroborate that Earth has been getting sharply warmer.
A 2006 National Research Council review of the evidence concluded “with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries”—which is the section of the graph most relevant to current climate trends. The report placed less faith in the reconstructions back to 900 A.D., although it still viewed them as “plausible.” Medieval warm periods in Europe and Asia with temperatures comparable to those seen in the 20th century were therefore similarly plausible but might have been local phenomena: the report noted “the magnitude and geographic extent of the warmth are uncertain.” And a new research paper by Mann and his colleagues seems to confirm that the Medieval Warm Period and the “Little Ice Age” between 1400 and 1700 were both caused by shifts in solar radiance and other natural factors that do not seem to be happening today.
After the NRC review was released, another analysis by four statisticians, called theWegman report, which was not formally peer reviewed, was more critical of the hockey stick paper. But correction of the errors it pointed out did not substantially change the shape of the hockey stick graph. In 2008 Mann and his colleagues issued an updated version of the temperature reconstruction that echoed their earlier findings.
But hypothetically, even if the hockey stick was busted… What of it? The case for anthropogenic global warming originally came from studies of climate mechanics, not from reconstructions of past temperatures seeking a cause. Warnings about current warming trends came out years before Mann’s hockey stick graph. Even if the world were incontrovertibly warmer 1,000 years ago, it would not change the fact that the recent rapid rise in CO2 explains the current episode of warming more credibly than any natural factor does—and that no natural factor seems poised to offset further warming in the years ahead.
Claim 3: Global warming stopped a decade ago; Earth has been cooling since then.
1998 was the world’s warmest year in the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre’s records; recent years have been cooler; therefore, the previous century’s global warmingtrend is over, right?
Anyone with even a glancing familiarity with statistics should be able to spot the weaknesses of that argument. Given the extended duration of the warming trend, the expected (and observed) variations in the rate of increase and the range of uncertainties in the temperature measurements and forecasts, a decade’s worth of mild interruption is too small a deviation to prove a break in the pattern,climatologists say.
Recently, Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein asked four independent statisticians to look for trends in the temperature data sets without telling them what the numbers represented. “The experts found no true temperature declines over time,” he wrote.
If a lull in global warming continues for another decade, would that vindicate the contrarians’ case? Not necessarily, because climate is complex. For instance, Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Germany and his colleagues published a paper in 2008 that suggested ocean circulation patterns might cause a period of cooling in parts of the northern hemisphere, even though the long-term pattern of warming remained in effect. Fundamentally, contrarians who have resisted the abundant evidence that supports warming should not be too quick to leap on evidence that only hints at the opposite.
Paul,
Sorry you have a problem with nuance in language usage.
I wrote: “I was also taught in religion classes that the Bible is not a work of nonfiction.” That doesn’t have the exact same meaning as the following: I was also taught in religion classes that the Bible is a work of fiction.
The difference in meaning is subtle, I know. Maybe too subtle for some to discern.
Elaine M – you wrote “I was also taught in religion classes that the Bible is not a work of nonfiction.” That is a double negative. In the English used in the United States that becomes a positive. Therefore your sentence actually reads “I was also taught in religion classes that the Bible is a work of fiction.” I am really curious as to which religion taught you this.
Paul,
I am a product of parochial schools. Evolution was taught in science classes at my high school. I learned nothing about events being caused by an interfering God. I was also taught in religion classes that the Bible is not a work of nonfiction.
Elaine – got to ask. Which religion taught the Bible was fiction? You have a double negative working there.
A hands-off God?
Stephen Jay Gould’s new study Rocks of Ages is a scientist’s response to the creationists. Chris Lavers learns why science and religion don’t mix
Chris Lavers
The Guardian, Friday 2 February 2001
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/feb/03/scienceandnature.science
Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life
Stephen Jay Gould
One is tempted to assume that few people in their right minds these days would turn to the Bible for lessons in earth history, or to The Origin of Species for guidance on moral issues. However, while it is accepted in most western cultures that science and religion occupy largely distinct intellectual domains, the situation is much more complicated in the USA, and only with this appreciation is it possible to understand why anyone would bother writing a book like Rocks of Ages .
Stephen Jay Gould, an American paleontologist and the closest thing to a polymath that science has produced in the last 30 years, is acutely aware that many of his fellow countryfolk are not in their right minds. His principle problem is with young-earth creationists, a frighteningly well-organised group of pseudo-intellectuals who insist on adhering to a literal interpretation of the Bible. To these people the world really is less than 10,000 years old and really was created by God in six days.
Creationism is not entirely an American phenomenon, but it has become a grave problem there because a great many people take it seriously. Indeed, so powerful is the Christian fundamentalist lobby that in 1987 creationists and scientists (including Gould) ended up duking it out in the Supreme Court over the issue of whether evolution and creationism should be taught side by side in schools. Fortunately science won the day, but no one expects the conflict to end there. Truth be told, the spectre of creationism continues to scare the bejesus out of liberal intellectuals right across the USA.
So, in large part to head off the creationists at the pass, Gould has penned an extended essay dedicated to the achingly simple argument that science and religion have absolutely no common ground and thus should not be confused with one another. He encapsulates this idea in the phrase Non-Overlapping Magisteria, or NOMA. A magisterium is a domain within which a particular school of teaching has the right tools to engineer meaningful discourse. Magisteria may overlap, but if, as Gould argues, those of science and religion do not, then the investigative and explanatory tools of science will not work anywhere within the magisterium of religion, and vice versa. Thus Gould maintains that religion has nothing meaningful to say about the empirical realm, while science has nothing to say about morality or ultimate meaning. The two magisteria are as chalk and cheese, and those who choose to eat the former or draw with the latter are being either pig-headed or just plain stupid.
By exploring a number of historical examples ranging from Galileo’s spat with the Catholic church to the flowering of American creationism in the 1980s, Gould shows how violation of the NOMA principle inevitably generates tension between science and religion. Acknowledgment of the immiscibility of magisteria, he says, renders such conflicts meaningless; thus respectful adherence to the principle of NOMA might in the future prevent a lot of ill feeling and save everyone time and trouble. Here Gould is at his brilliant best, illuminating the present with the past, dissecting and reinterpreting historical events and ideas, and effectively cementing the principle of NOMA in the reader’s mind by sheer force of example. For those sympathetic to the basic idea (and patient with Gould’s convoluted prose), it is a typically convincing performance.
But not everyone, I suspect, even in post-fundamentalist Britain, will be sympathetic to the principle of NOMA. Many ordinary Christians (although probably not many theologians) are likely to balk at the idea because it threatens two of their most cherished beliefs, namely that God can perform miracles and answer prayers. If the devout surrender the empirical world entirely to science, this is tantamount to admitting that God imbued the universe with natural law at the beginning of time and has not meddled with it since. But if God can alter the empirical world, either by temporarily suspending natural law (miracles) or intervening in response to prayer, then the magisteria of science and religion do overlap, and tools from both domains are required to understand reality. As science cannot countenance divine intervention, the only way to separate the two magisteria would be for the devout to accept a completely hands-off God, and I suspect that for many this is simply not an option.
Elaine M – The Guardian is another source that you did not list but you have used at least four times in this discussion. RTS is offended when I use the Telegraph and I have commented that the Guardian is the most liberal paper in London. It is the go-to paper if you are going to leak state secrets.
I don’t think most Christian theologians have a problem with the Theory of Evolution, except when people try to make a ‘religion’ out of it. There is a great difference between the views of “fundamentalists” and other Christians.
Regardless of this article, science can and has accepted a hands-on God. There are many scientists who practice their religion accepting an interfering God. However, that God does not interfere often. For instance, the Roman Catholic Church has a long process to acknowledge events caused by an interfering God. The Devil’s Advocate is the person assigned by the Church to try to prove that God was not involved. The Devil’s Advocate takes their job very seriously. That same Church is a strong supporter of the sciences. Arizona is the home of one of the Vatican telescopes.
The article is logically flawed.
OT:
Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Barton Gellman, “live” now:
http://www.cuny.tv/SourcesAndSecrets
Elaine M – for the purposes of THIS discussion, none of the sources that you listed have been used. And the sources you have used have are not on your list. That is all we are talking about. You have a habit of reading A and concluding F. You conclude things that are impossible to legitimately conclude given the information at hand. You have done this to me as well as david. You are finding the answer you WANT to find, not the answer that is really there.
“How Science Responds When Creationists Criticize Evolution”
Boyce Rensberger
Washington Post Staff Writer
January 8, 1997
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file021.html
Excerpt:
Maybe you’ve encountered them, the perfectly nice people who stop you with a statement like, “Well, you know, evolution is just a theory, and it’s very controversial, even among scientists.”
Or maybe they say, “There’s no way a bunch of gears and springs in a junk pile could suddenly fall together by accident and become a working watch. The existence of a watch tells you there had to be an intelligent watchmaker.” Sometimes, they’ll stump you by asserting that, on his deathbed, Charles Darwin renounced his theory of evolution.
Usually the people who say these things mean well. But the statements are based on a faulty understanding of biology. Unfortunately, many of us challenged by those who call themselves creationists are not well prepared to respond.
But science has good answers to these challenges to the theory of evolution. First, there’s absolutely no controversy within science about the reality of evolution. There is a well accepted, solidly established body of evidence showing that evolution is real and, although knowledge of some mechanisms is incomplete, much is known about how evolution works. From this body of information we’ve drawn answers to some of the most common challenges issued by creationists.
Take that last one, about Darwin on his deathbed. Not only is it irrelevant to whether evolution is true, the statement is false. For one thing, Darwin would have had no motive to recant. Before the great naturalist died in 1882, he had the satisfaction of knowing that the Church of England and several other Christian denominations had declared there to be no conflict between his theory and the churchs’ teachings. Indeed, Darwin, an evolutionist to the end, was laid to rest in the hallowed ground of Westminster Abbey.
In the generations since, most major denominations within the Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions have found Darwinian evolution compatible with their religious beliefs. The statement by Pope John Paul II in November that evolution was more than a hypothesis was the fourth acceptance of evolution by the Roman Catholic Church.
For some people, fundamentalist Protestants most prominently, the issue likewise has been settled but with the opposite verdict.
For them, Genesis, however poetic, never uses metaphor or simile to tell the story of how the world and its inhabitants came to be. To them, the Bible is a scientific document to be taken literally. If science makes a claim counter to the Bible, creationists say it is automatically understood that science is wrong and a literal reading of the scripture is right.
Creationists believe that God created each kind of living thing independently and instantaneously about 6,000 years ago and all during the first six days.
Evolutionists believe that all living things are descended, through a cumulative series of genetic changes, from one common ancestor, or perhaps a few ancestors. The first ancestors would have been primitive, self-replicating, cell-like structures that arose more than 3.5 billion years ago. Evolutionists are, however, quite far from explaining how the first living thing arose.
Here with are criticisms you may hear, drawn from creationists and their literature, and responses based on what scientists have learned. What follows is not an attack on creationism but a defense of evolutionism.
Evolution is just a theory; it hasn’t been proved.
Well, yes, evolution is a theory, but not in the way that critics think. When scientists refer to it as the “theory of evolution,” the wording does not mean that they doubt it’s true. Evolution has been nailed down about as solidly as anything can be in science.
The confusion arises because in science “theory” means more than “hypothesis.” A hypothesis is a speculation or a prediction. Experiments or observations are needed to verify it. A theory, on the other hand, is a broad explanation for a class of phenomena. It generally is bigger and grander than a single hypothesis, even one that has passed all tests.
Thus, atomic theory is the coherent set of explanations of the structure and behavior of atoms. Einstein’s theory of relativity has passed every experimental test but still is called a theory.
In science, an explanation becomes a theory if it is internally consistent, always agrees with observations and can be used to make testable predictions (hypotheses). Within a theory may be “laws,” which can be expressed more tersely, often with mathematical equations.
So, has evolution been proved true? Strictly speaking, no. It is an accepted fact of scientific logic that you can never prove something true. Experiments and observations can only falsify theories or hypotheses.
Scientists insist on many tests of a hypothesis, the results all tending in the same direction before they accept it as probably true. The more evidence, the more acceptable it is and the higher the probability of truth.
Still, in science there is no such thing as 100 percent certainty. The evidence for evolution is so overwhelming that scientists say the probability of it being true approaches 100 percent. The fact that creationists say they are fully 100 percent certain of their view is based not on scientific evidence but, as their own literature says, on their faith in the literal truth of Genesis, which gives rise to doubts about the scientific case.
In fact, evolution has massive amounts of supporting evidence from many fields of science—anatomy, geology, animal behavior, paleontology and even molecular biology.
The odds against random chance producing a complex organism from lifeless ingredients are astronomical.
If chance were the only factor, this would be true. But chance is only one of two key players, and the other, natural selection, is decidedly not random. It favors species better adapted to their environments and kills off those less suitable. The process applies to all living things.
Here’s how it works. Every generation usually produces more offspring than can survive, given limited supplies of food, water, space and other resources in a given habitat. For no species are Earth’s natural resources unlimited. Individuals must compete with other members of their own species for these resources.
The offspring, however, are slightly different from one another in genetic endowment. Because of mutations in genes—here’s the only random part—siblings differ in various subtle ways.
As a result, individuals that happen to inherit traits that give them an advantage automatically will be more likely to survive than their relatives lacking the trait.
They probably will have more offpsring, and the offspring will inherit the genetic trait.
Far from being random, natural selection ensures that the only players in what Darwin called the “struggle for existence” are those that have passed all previous tests.
There are no transitional fossils.
The fossil record is rife with gaps where evolution says there should be intermediate forms.
Far from it. Paleontologists have found many transitional fossils representing intermediate forms in the evolution of one major form of life into another.
There are, for example, excellent skeletons of extinct animals showing the transitions from primitive fish to bony fish, from fish to amphibian (the first four-legged creatures walked on the ocean bottom, not on land), from amphibian to reptile, from reptile to mammal (it happened about the time the first dinosaurs were arising), from reptile to bird (the bird-sized Archaeopteryx specimen from southern Germany, for example, has feathers and dinosaurlike teeth) and even from land animal to whale (there are fossil whales with four legs, and modern whales still have remnants of hind legs buried in their flesh; their front legs have changed into flippers).
There is abundant fossil evidence showing transitional diversifications among mammals into rodents, bats, rabbits, carnivores, horses, elephants, manatee, deer, cows and many others. One of the most finely divided sequences of transitions documents the evolution of apelike creatures through half a dozen intermediate forms into modern humans.
Perhaps the oldest known transitional sequence involves the horse. It starts about 55 million years ago with a terrier-sized creature that had four toes in front and three in back. This is the famous species once called Eohippus, but now, for technical reasons, renamed Hyracotherium.
The lineage evolved through at least 14 steps, each represented in the fossil record by a successful species, until the modern horse, a pony-sized Equus, the genus to which modern horses belong, appeared about 4 million years ago.
Still, gaps in the fossil record will keep paleontologists busy for decades. Most kinds of fossils are extremely rare. After all, to become a fossil, the species not only must exist, but individuals also must die in places where conditions are right for preservation. In other words, the skeleton must be buried in sediments with preservative properties before scavengers or weathering can destroy it. Then only a few of those places will undergo erosion or uplifting that exposes the long-buried remains.
RTC:
thanks for that bit of advice on the native plants, when I am ready to plant this spring I will ask the local garden center for what they recommend.
davidm2575,
Join Paul with a copy of “Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples” and have a lovely day.
Says Paul Schulte: “My favorite paper title in the area is Stephen Gould’s “Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples”.”
You might want to curl up with it today. Read it again and again. (You’ve already mentioned it at least twice.) Keep reading it.
anonymous2 – I think Elaine is the one who has the interest in reading Gould’s papers and books. Check with her for a copy. I just like the title. 🙂
pete – you do not have enough gravitas to have a corollary to any law, much less Godwin’s. Clearly you have run out of things to say. 🙂