Gray Whale, Southern-Hemisphere Algae Seen In N. Atlantic 257
oxide7 writes "The gray whale hasn't strayed to the Northern Atlantic since the 18th century. The Neodenticula seminae, a species of algae, hasn't been there in 800,000 years. Now, members of both species have been spotted in the Northern Atlantic."
Re:What happened in the 18th century? (Score:4, Informative)
From the Wikipedia article on Gray whales:
North Atlantic populations were extirpated (perhaps by whaling) on the European coast before 500 AD and on the American coast around the late 17th to early 18th centuries.
Says who? (Score:5, Informative)
That was a terrible article. It has almost no detail. In particular, the only source given for this information is "scientists".
Here's [sahfos.ac.uk] a better reference for the algae.
I find lots of articles online linking the whales and the algae, which, while much better than the one linked to in the summary, don't say much more about the whale than that it was spotted off the coast of Israel.
Re:Says who? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:This is bad because? (Score:4, Informative)
Depends on what you consider to be an equilibrium. For instance, imagine a teeter-totter. It goes back and forth, but it does so predictably. That, to me, is equilibrium. That's a very simple system, but ecosystems are not simple at all.
When Steven Jay Gould spoke of stasis and punctuated equilibrium, I don't think he was really using those terms in the way most people might consider them. Certainly, day to day, things change. But in the bigger picture, evolution will naturally drive us towards what, relatively speaking, is equilibrium. There's a steady rhythm, a natural cycle that might not seem very predictable to human eyes.
Check out this double pendulum.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VmTiyTut6A
Seems chaotic, right? But its not. It's just complex--too complex for humans. Your average ecosystem is like a ten-thousand part pendulum. One year there might be 10x as many frogs running around as the year before, due to a confluence of other conditions, and the next year there's a drought and there's hardly any. Even though everything seems to be in flux, it's still in a state of equilibrium. From day to day, things seem different, but if you look at a much, much bigger picture, you find that things stay the same for long periods of time until there's some massive disruption.
Re:This is bad because? (Score:5, Informative)
Of course it is relevant to understand what's causing a certain phenomenon. If we understand how current warming is caused by increasing greenhouse gases, then we also know how much we can influence warming by reducing the amount of those gases we produce.
And even if we choose not to limit CO2 production, we can use the knowledge to estimate how big the warming is going to be, and what kind of problems it could cause within a certain time frame. That knowledge could be used to allocate the necessary funds to deal with the problems.
Sigh (Score:5, Informative)
Well smartass, that was EXACTLY what the parent and the documentary are claiming isn't true. Nature was thought for a long time to be a balanced machine (to many rabbits, the foxes do well reducing the number of rabbits and then the excess of foxes dies as there are fewer rabbits to eat allowing the rabbits to restore themselves).
And the documentary showed how this believe came into being, how it was used and then how it was completely and utter debunked. In nature this does NOT happen. Not that nature doesn't appear to balance out but there is no balancing mechanism in place. It is VERY possible for the foxes to eat all the rabbits. No magic rebalancing act. Nature has plenty of example in all the extinct species.
Welcome to new century, some old ideas are going to be replaced by new ones. Constantly balancing eco system is so last century.
Re:This is bad because? (Score:2, Informative)
Check out this double pendulum.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VmTiyTut6A
Seems chaotic, right? But its not.
You know, words have meanings, and flatly denying them does not change it, it just makes you look like an idiot.
Chaos Theory [wikimedia.org]
Double Pendulum [wikimedia.org]
Perhaps you meant it's not "random" or "non-deterministic" -- they're different words with different meaning -- but it most certainly is chaotic.
Re:What happened in the 18th century? (Score:4, Informative)
However, on May 8, 2010, a sighting of a gray whale was confirmed off the coast of Israel in the Mediterranean Sea,[7] leading some scientists to think they might be repopulating old breeding grounds that have not been used for centuries.[7]
So, is climate change responsible? Or is it simpler, Occam - like growth of the species allowing a return to former breeding grounds? Guess it depends on your/the 'viewpoint' you need to support...
Re:This is bad because? (Score:5, Informative)
And once upon a time there was no debate about the fact that it was possible to turn lead into gold or that the sun revolved around the earth in scientific literature. That's because science is actually, and a little counter intuitively, quite stuck in its ways. When there is an established fact that the vast majority of the community believe in, it's very difficult to publish a counter argument (periodicals don't want to be viewed as "wacky" for publishing thinking outside the box), and it's led science down the wrong route many times in the past. That's not to say I believe the current position is wrong, but making anything difficult to openly question in scientific circles is unproductive.
1) The scientific method and the culture we identify as Science first started to look like their modern forms in the 1600s. It's not a coincidence that alchemy (which was always questioned and outright denied by many or most prominent "natural philosophers," despite your assertion to the contrary) began to die in the 1600s.
2) Your argument that science goes down the wrong route nicely refutes your argument that science is stuck in its ways - we only know that we've taken the wrong route because science is inherently great at revising ideas and getting us away from bad ones. The most fame you can have as a scientist comes from questioning and overturning (with evidence) current ideas. However, most current scientific ideas are pretty solidly grounded, so the most common claims of refutation are made by whacky pseudoscientists, since it's increasingly difficult to find accepted theories that are genuinely scientifically invalid.
More than any other field in history, science automatically adapts with time to more closely resemble the truth.