[Coral-List] Acropora and the Thundering Herd
Gene Shinn
eshinn at marine.usf.edu
Thu Oct 4 14:22:55 EDT 2007
I had a suspicion the website on Acropora put out by the
"conservative think tank" organization would get the herd biological
juices flowing. That the messenger would be attacked more than the
message also was not very surprising. And James, in my posting I
said, "this is something different." I don't recall advocating that
warming would increase reef diversity, and did I really say I didn't
believe in land-based sources of pollution? I just thought it would
be educational for the herd to see how scientific publications can be
used or misused to support different agendas. I think Bill Precht
provided a well-reasoned response, and I am sorry that my posting
precipitated the pain it must have caused him to see his data misused.
I found it interesting how quickly some people fall back on peer
review when they want to discredit ideas they do not like. Although I
support peer review, I am well aware how it can suppress new ideas
and approaches. I recall publishing those thoughts and examples in an
editorial called, "Paradigm Disease." If you want continued funding,
run with the herd and peer review will keep you in the herd so you
don't get trampled. We coral folks have been running along the same
path for way too long, as Mike Risk pointed out in his last posting.
As he mentioned, there has been precious little basic research on
those subjects we hold so dear. I wonder how Michael Faraday and
Albert Einstein would survive today's peer-review system of funding
and publication? How did they get that stuff about electricity and
relativity accepted? Gee, they must have had secret funding from
ExxonMobile? Closer to the present, consider the Archaea, a new
domain of microbes first announced in 1977 by Carl Woese. That the
Archaea even existed was met with silence by the microbiology herd.
While Woese endured "the cone of silence" from fellow
microbiologists, Salvador Luria, the Nobel Prize winner for medicine,
viciously attacked his character. Tim Friend, author of the book The
Third Domain, points out that it took 30 years for conventional
microbiology to catch up and recognize that Archaea are some of the
most common and important microbes on the planet. Because of such
examples, and personal experiences, I learned to ignore comments
like, "was it peer reviewed."
I thought the website that started all this fuss would provide a
good example of how politics flavors science (on both sides of aisle,
as they say in Congress). While I don't agree that warming will
increase biodiversity, I did agree that listing Acropora was not a
decision based on science but rather feel-good politics. The center
for biodiversity (who knows who backs them) forced NMFS into the
legal corner in which they now find themselves. They now have to
figure out how to save a species while not knowing what is killing
it. The bottom line is how do you protect something if you don't know
what's killing it? Do you just create more restricted areas, require
more complicated permits and retard the progress of research? Science
in general is under attack. We don't serve science in the eyes of the
public when we let ourselves be used for political agendas. And yes
James, I do believe in land-based sources. Especially when the source
is North Africa and it arrives on Caribbean reefs by hundreds of
millions of tons. Gene
--
No Rocks, No Water, No Ecosystem (EAS)
------------------------------------ -----------------------------------
E. A. Shinn, Courtesy Professor
University of South Florida
Marine Science Center (room 204)
140 Seventh Avenue South
St. Petersburg, FL 33701
<eshinn at marine.usf.edu>
Tel 727 553-1158----------------------------------
-----------------------------------
More information about the Coral-List
mailing list