Bad Science
"If the ice age comes again, you know, I'll deal with it. I'll get by. It's always something."
okay. i will confess. i am not a very good scientist. i barely made it through high school chemistry with mr. lemeaux and the human evolution course i took at college had me panicked that i would fail.
yesterday, i proofed madhavi's final paper of the semester for her and was fairly exuberant that i understood most of it. it was, i believe, about fish. (*kidding!*) it was definitely about fish, and what factors might make a rare species rare, and what sort of experiments a scientist could do if they wanted to prove any of it. i think it is important to note that these are unanswered questions. scientists do not even have a clear definition of what "rare" means. jeez!
um. what was i talking about? oh. yes. bad science.
so the wildflower and me, we talk about environmental science and global warming and the plight of the west-african pelican clam and all of these things. and she keeps doing this squirmy dance 'cause she's done for the semester and has a very nice lemon bar to eat. and i posit that the factors that determine rarity might be different from the factors that determine what thrives. thrivity? not a word. thrifty! that's a word! factors that determine thrifty.
she gives me the bad scientist look. (why? i'm so unfairly maligned! oh. the humanity!)
but, see, i'm not a scientist. i am a writer and a kook. and i think that depending wholly on the current acheivements of science for answers is foolish. for example; until there was gallileo, we thought everything revolved around the earth and that made sense until gallileo proved otherwise, right? we still have no idea how bumblebees fly or how whales survive at great depth. but they do. and i started trying to explain my theories, talking about leaps in evolution, but i am a bad scientist.
bad scientist! no beaker!
is this interesting at all? whatever. i'm interested. deal.
what is it that allows a species to transcend its environment? she's been talking (in terms of fish, mind) about how factors like predation, available habitat, fecundity (my new favorite word), and food supply can limit a species demographically and make it rare or common. i'm wondering about species like the rat, which not only dominates it's environment -- it's not rare -- but threatens to transcend its environment and become as pervasive and horrible as humans. is there a difference between what limits rarity and what limits pervasiveness?
madhavi says no and she's probably right. i guess i just have a hard time believing we understand as much as we think we do. not that we're necessarily wrong about anything, but perhaps we're only seeing some of the picture. like we know that if you heat ice it melts but haven't figured out that if you keep heating it that it can become steam.
although i guess in that example the limiting factor for both transitions is heat, so stomp stomp stomp grrr.
i just want to dream that there are big discoveries that will shake everything up just around the corner. mostly because i like dreaming and the way things are going now are fairly bleak.
like, what if all this string theory stuff that i can barely comprehend but which seems to involve other dimensions and string gets figured out and we learn how to move in more dimensions than a vegas borg show? that would certainly significantly change the rarity limits of fish. perhaps some fish are just rare in the three dimensions we can interact with, huh? maybe in the fifth dimension, there are plenty of west-african pelican clams. and maybe they taste good!
as my friends wrote, "are there other dimensions? and if so, could we make them fight? and if so, what would the spread be?"
i will end this mostly pointless investigation into my poor science by saying this. we've been in the industrial age long enough. it's not really making me so excited. feh. industry. you've got a better idea? let's hear it.
how about the age of beach vacations? or the age of leafy greens. anything really. as long as it involves hot tubs. and wildflowers.
xz wrote: "what is it that allows a species to transcend its environment?" can anything really transcend its environment? if a species expands its range to encompass new territory, then it simply has a larger territory. it hasn't "transcended" anything, and certainly is still intimately connected with its environment. can you think of any species that isn't connected with its environment? even we homo sapiens who are perhaps the most removed, still breath air, rely on sunlight, and drink water.
argumentatively yours,
mc
right. i meant transcend it's current environment to encompass a new one, i.e. the mudskipper.
but i wear my bad scientist hat with a foolish pride.
Huh?
"it was definitely about fish, and what factors might make a rare species rare..."
um. just kill most of them. then the ones left become rare.
darn. ed is onto me - he's uncovered the secret behind my thesis. i guess i'll have to get another one. any suggestions?