Asia’s empty forests 1 Sep 2008 The Annotated Budak has an absolutely wonderful post on megafauna, hominid impacts, biodiversity and biogeography up. Go read it immediately. Ecology and Biodiversity Evolution Species and systematics
Evolution Christianity Today = Inanity Today? 29 Aug 2007 Oh honestly. Christianity Today reports the travel of the Australopithecine fossil “Lucy” to the US with the closing paragraph: It should be interesting to see what the interest in Lucy is, given that according to opinion polls roughly half of the American public has expressed serious reservations about the theory… Read More
Evolution Spencer was no social Darwinian 30 Jul 20084 Oct 2017 For a while now, and in particular since I read Robert Bannister’s Social Darwinism and then actually read Herbert Spencer’s own work, I have been unable to reconcile the mythology about social Darwinism with the actual writings of Spencer himself. Supposedly the founder of the justification for robber baron capitalism,… Read More
Ecology and Biodiversity How many species of plant are there? 3 Jan 2011 It should be a simple question. After all, we have been describing, naming, and studying species of plants for 500 years, and the whole system of nomenclature and classification was developed in order to list plants. Estimate range widely, from 200,000 to nearly 300,000 or even 400,000 [also here] and… Read More
Interesting. I have a project coming up in south east Asia looking at biodiversity, land use, socio-economic trends, and climate change. To paraphrase old what’s his face “it is the best of worlds, it is the worst of worlds”.