Plucked From The Web January 2022
Once in a while I like to share what I read during the last month online, and what I thought was an excellent use of my time and mental energy. The amount of information on the internets is of course enormous, and any filter/recommendation can help to use your time in absorbing some of that information selectively. I hope my plucked-from-the-web blog posts help a bit with that…
Mammals Going Downhill
Besides a climate crisis, the biosphere is experiencing a biodiversity crisis, that’s certain. But how bad is it, and how long will the recovery take?
A new paper by Davis and colleagues looks at the extinction rates of mammals, and the likely recovery times.
There are several measures of biodiversity – simply the number of species, but also the loss of the depth of the mammalian family tree, and the “functional diversity”, with small and large body sizes represented equally, for instance. the authors write that [if extinction rates improve right away] ” 4–5 My before median body mass returned to its pre-Pleistocene extinction level”.
Bad times for biodiversity, which will last a long time!
SciAm Going Downhill
I have one article published in Scientific American Mind, on the parallels between cameras and eyes, written with my friend Alex Holcombe. I still think this is an interesting article. The venue where it was published used to be something I was really proud about, I am not so sure about the weight of this achievement anymore.
The popular science magazine took the occasion of the passing of one of the greatest biologists of our time, EO Wilson, to publish a shameful hit-piece, as it’s well characterized in the blog post below. Not only is the attack on the memory of Wilson completely despicable, the author seems to have zero knowledge of Wilson’s work and even the most basic basic concepts of statistics. The hit-piece was seemingly published to signal complete allegiance to a fashionable ideology? Bizarre. More about the demise of this once excellent magazine in the blog post by Ashutosh Jogalekar:
The demise of Scientific American: Guest post by Ashutosh Jogalekar
Here is, if you haven’t seen it yet, my personal obituary of Wilson, whom I sadly never met in person: