Saturday, September 20, 2014
Here's why science is DEAD.
Dr Livingstone's beetles, I presume?
David Livingstone’s only known beetle specimens have been discovered at the Museum - 150 years after he brought them back from Africa. The specimens were unearthed by curators cataloguing and photographing the Museum’s collection for its online database.
The insects were donated to the Museum by a private collector, Edward Young Western, in 1924. He is thought to have bought them directly from a member of the Zambezi expedition. In the days before digital records, they got lost among the Museum’s 10 million beetle specimens and sat unnoticed for 90 years.
Before digital records?.... Digital databases can locate a record faster, provided the record is IN the database. But the process of creating records from actual specimens is still non-digital. So you can't credit digitality for the newly examined specimens.
Barclay said that the specimens are already shedding light on the effects of environmental change in the Zambezi region.
Oh? They're all extinct now?
Museum entomologist Hitoshi Takano recently led a number of expeditions retracing Dr Livingstone’s footsteps across Africa’s interior. During his travels he came across many of the same beetle species that Dr Livingstone spotted 150 years before.
No. They're nearly all the same. Facts and logic would lead you to conclude that conditions haven't changed much. But that's not what "scientists" conclude:
The fact that most of the same species can still be found in Zambezi today means that the environments in the area might have changed less than we expected. Or, against all odds, many species from Dr Livingstone’s day still remain despite 150 years of habitat destruction and deforestation.
Whoa there! Whoopsie! You came waaaaaaay too close to facts there for a moment. Need to recover your "scientist" credentials FAST!
But one species of beetle collected from Zambezi by Dr Livingstone was not found in the region during Takano’s expeditions. "It is possible that this species has declined or been lost from the region. Insects are often like the canary in the mine - their decline warns us about environmental changes that we may not have easily noticed."
Ahhh. That's better. Won't lose our grants now. All is well. We got our Climate Change and we got our Unnoticed Effects (which in an earlier less enlightened time would have been called 'pseudoscience' or 'fraud') and we got our Canary In The Mine.
¶ 3:44 AM 
