good job aim64c, you just disproved a research an experiment done by "educated" university dumbasses through your extremely intelligent posts on an online anime/manga forum!
My goodness, what blaspheme you espouse.
[video=youtube;lsbK6g10a-c]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsbK6g10a-c[/video]
Tell me.
What variables did they manipulate? What variables did they control? What processes were they observing?
What they did was not an experiment. At best, it counts as a correlative study of descriptive databases that attempts to ascertain the relationship of number of extinctions through time.
I can't embed two videos, but:
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This is also very important because we have to look at our evaluation methods and put our results into the context and confines of our methods of evaluation. There are a vast number of assumptions that go into this type of research that simply can't be tested or evaluated for their accuracy. How accurate are our estimates of biodiversity 65 million years ago? We can't know, and it is very difficult to prove estimates to be wrong (and therefor, it is very difficult to have a high degree of confidence short of being arrogant).
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Many of the methods used to develop estimates that these studies predicate themselves upon have absolutely no means of testing and no means of control. They are just guesses stacked upon guesses.
They may be rooted in mathematics. They may have some statistics to reinforce the guess to some degree.
But this is, functionally, the same process used to forecast the weather - and we all know how accurate that is. True, it's gotten better with more advanced simulations and better understandings of the relationships between atmospheric phenomena - but it's far from authoritative.
See, this is also why I like to cite other sources, rather than post, myself.
Because, apparently, all of us on anime forums are supposed to be inferior of intellect to college academics and to just accept their idle musings as the decree of gods.
So, I'll cite other academics who have more authority to their arguments than I do:
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"In fact, the huge extinction figures come from pure assumptions, which are based on the alleged implications of "habitat loss." These assumptions relate to the "background" rate of extinction, the number of undiscovered species on earth, and how much present rates of extinction might be above background rates due to human activity. They are, in other words, axe-grinding speculation. Cubed.
The calculations work like this: You assume that the "background" rate of extinction is, say, one species per million species per year. Then you estimate that there are 30 million species on earth (versus the 1.9 million so far classified). Then you assume that the present rate of extinction is, what the hell, say a thousand times the background level. Hence you arrive at a figure of 30,000 by assuming vast numbers of species that have never been identified and may not exist, the vast majority of which are, moreover, not pandas but notional bugs and bacteria.
Actual observations of habitat loss in no way backed up apocalyptic extinction estimates.
This means that the most egregious error at the Field Museum exhibit is the claim that "because the Earth is home to far more species than we've identified, there are surely many species going extinct unnoticed." But all the claimed 30,000 extinctions are "unnoticed." The Field cannot name any of them.
This is not considered a problem by the most radical proponents of global action to prevent the ravages of capitalism. Gro Harlem Brundtland, whose 1987 UN [United Nations] report is in many ways at the root of socialism's highly successful environmental counterthrust, has put it this way: "The library of life is burning, and we don't even know the titles of the books." "
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"Greenpeace Co-Founder and ecologist Dr. Patrick Moore, slammed a new study claiming a dramatic and irreversible mass species extinction. “This [journal Nature] article should never have made it through the peer-review process,” Moore told Climate Depot in an exclusive interview. “The fact that the study did make it through peer-review indicates that the peer review process has become corrupted,” Moore, the author of the new book “Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout,” added."
Emphasis, my own.
"“I quit my life-long subscription to National Geographic when they published a similar ‘sixth mass extinction’ article in February 1999. This [latest journal] Nature article just re-hashes this theme,” he added. Moore left Greenpeace in 1986 because he felt the organziation had become too radical. Moore also challenges man-made global warming fears. See: Greenpeace Co-Founder Dr. Patrick Moore Questions Man-Made Global Warming, Calls it ‘Obviously a Natural Phenomenon’
This is not the first time Moore has gone to battle over alarming claims of species extinction. In the 2000 documentary “Amazon Rainforest: Clear-Cutting The Myths”, Moore bluntly mocked species extinction claims made by biologist Edward O. Wilson from Harvard University. Wilson estimated that up to 50,000 species go extinct every year based on computer models of the number of potential but as yet undiscovered species in the world.
Moore said in 2000: “There’s no scientific basis for saying that 50,000 species are going extinct. The only place you can find them is in Edward O. Wilson’s computer at Harvard University. They’re actually electrons on a hard drive. I want a list of Latin names of actual species.” Moore was interviewed by reporter Marc Morano (now with Climate Depot) in the 2000 Amazon rainforest documentary. . ."
Here's an interesting read:
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"It is right and reasonable to be concerned with preserving nature in today's modern, industrialized world. Man wields greater destructive power than any previous species and does not have a good record of using that power wisely. However, H. sapiens cannot even come close to the power of uncaring nature. Comparing humanity's impact on nature to mass extinctions in the past requires a mixture of half hubris and half ignorance.
The use of research like Alroy's to promote an atmosphere of crisis over reduced species diversity is simply another example of the eco-activists creed—to get people to pay attention we must scare them to death. And using people's natural empathy for cute, cuddly animals to spread feelings of self loathing is just another cynical ploy used by those who claim to love nature but actually hate humanity. With the global warming “crisis” dying a slow and painful death, the green crowd is looking for a new crisis to frighten the world with. Unfortunately for them, diversity is an even less supportable crisis than climate change."
Summarizing the final point on that one. He launches into a lecture on the actual point of one of the research papers regarding biodiversity and also discusses the limitations of the study (IE - it was not intended to try to assess whether or not there is an impending mass extinction and was simply looking for trends in available data regarding how populations respond following extinction events).
And then there's this just for entertainment:
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"In one new argument, David Penny of Massey University in New Zealand and Matt Phillips from the University of Oxford contend the fossil record and the evolution of animals through modern times suggest the demise of dinosaurs began several million years before the catastrophic asteroid collision.
The dinosaurs were already in decline, Penny and Phillips believe, so the asteroid was only a nail in the coffin.
But in this month's issue of the journal Geology, a group led by David Fastovsky of the University of Rhode Island make the opposite case: The variety of dinosaur types reached their peak around the time the asteroid struck. "
And yet we are supposed to believe that our esteemed researchers can ascertain the "extinctions per year interval" of species accurately, when they use the same data and come to completely opposite conclusions about whether or not species were going extinct.
The article's conclusion pretty much sums it up perfectly:
"Fastovsky and his colleagues say previous studies that had shown a gradual decline prior to sudden death were wrong, typically having been based exclusively on the records of North American dinosaurs.
Today's headlines -- including in The Independent and The Melbourne Herald Sun -- made much of dinosaurs being wiped out in their prime, as though that was a fresh notion.
In all this hubbub, Peiser sees a clear loser, in addition to the dinosaurs.
"Once again we are faced with a textbook example of sloppy, unbalanced and misleading science reporting," Peiser wrote today. "If science coverage continues on this slippery slope, the public's trust in the reliability of science news may well fall to the level of political news coverage." "
Because that is basically what it has become.
With many of the loudest fields of scientific study receiving huge amounts of funding from governments where politicians like to treat such murky "science" as "climate" in election debate and to justify policy decisions that pass on contracts to associates who provide 'solutions' to these policy decisions (such as solar power plants that run on natural gas), it is, for all intents and purposes politics.
Those of us in fields that are not inside of this political hell hole have always looked at social sciences with skepticism (Feynman makes a point of that), and now even environmental sciences that used to be relatively firm have taken the freight train straight off the cliff to hell.
I'm from the engineering sciences. Physics, electronics, metallurgy, chemistry. Even we have some knock-down, drag-out debates over experimental results that can be reliably repeated by others and directly verified. Just look at the early debates regarding Quantum Mechanics (and the debates that are still raging on as to exactly what the hell is going on or what it's useful for). The fact is that while we used Quantum Mechanics to develop the theories that led to semiconductor electronics - we still don't know exactly how it works and are just making our best guesses based upon the experimental data.
New models come out all the time based upon new guesses regarding what is causing the fundamental behavior of some phenomena or another. Just recently, they confirmed that quantum tunneling makes the distinction between the transfer of thermal energy (phonons) during conduction and radiation. If you place two objects close enough to each other, but leave a gap, the thermal energy transfer behaves exactly according to the known phenomena of quantum tunneling and photons are not involved.
This is important because our theories have to actually hold up to being tested. When the theory behind semiconductor phenomena was developed - it was developed for a utilitarian purpose. It is a useless theory if it can't predict or describe real-world behavior in a manner that allows us to build a functional device/system. Even if the current theories regarding semiconductors are eventually proven to be wrong - or even the idea of atoms is eventually proven to be wrong through some set of unforeseen observations and experiments, the theories regarding them have use insofar as how we have successfully used them up to this point.
This is why we typically don't take climate science seriously, or these studies that attempt to guess at things that people have to be either arrogant or desperate to guess at in the first place. How many species were around 65 million years ago? Who in the hell thinks they have any kind of sufficient data to even begin to make an estimate of that? We can work within the confines of the data we do have, but that is such a severe limitation that trying to draw such insane conclusions as "we are on the brink of a mass extinction" is so far beyond ridiculous as to be simply laughable.
I can forgive a study done simply in the pursuit of intellectual curiosity. "What would we see if we use what we estimate to be our best available guesses?" But to consider that to be anything other than an idle exercise is obscenely arrogant.
Even I wouldn't be arrogant enough to assume I had enough information to make the kinds of conclusions these people are making.
Think about that one for a second.
