I’d like to propose a project. It involves sending something into space, but it’s simple enough. It doesn’t need any high power instruments, or any real support infrastructure on Earth.
The goal of this project would be to land on the Moon a bit of text, carved into some material that would survive the next billion years of so of cosmic rays and micrometeorite buffeting. A single page with a simple message:
On the adjoining world, life appeared more than four billion years before this plaque was created. And for many millions of years, it thrived in astounding diversity.
At the end of that time, a species appeared which was intelligent enough to manipulate its environment. It replaced forests with fields to grow the foods that it liked best. It removed animals from its surroundings and replaced them those it could easily kill and eat. It built its homes everywhere and spread in incredible numbers, until that species and the ones that it maintained for food made up all but a tiny fraction of complex life on the planet.
Eventually, that species made such an impact that it altered the very chemistry of the air and water around it. The atmosphere became warmer. The seas more acid. Caught between the surging billions and the drastic changes to the environment, other life on the planet began to die away by first dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, and finally millions of species. Even the smallest things, tiny creatures that had once swarmed everywhere, faded away.
The time from when it first began to seriously manipulate its environment, to when this species brought its world to the brink was amazingly short—only a few hundred turnings of the planet around its star. There was no way for any other species to survive this sudden, unprecedented onslaught. No other species in life’s long history had such capacity to cause rapid change.
And then ...
And that’s how the plaque should end. And then. But not just those words; there should also be room for a few paragraphs more. Room for someone to stand there in decades or centuries yet to come and write the happy outcome. Room to record how humankind pulled back from the brink. How it recognized the real crisis at last. How it rebuilt, restored, renewed. How it saved its one precious home and became a worthy citizen of that world, and of others.
Room for that … or silence.
Biodiversity
New York Times: This black panther is not a movie, but it is an uplifting story.
Iliana Magra
It’s a scientific coup to warm the heart of any superhero fan: the first documented sightings of a black panther in Africa in about 100 years, not far from where Marvel places the fictional setting of its Oscar-nominated “Black Panther.”
Within the back channels of Daily Kos science, there’s a joke that the whole thing should be renamed the “Eschatology Department.” Which would be funnier, if it wasn’t also sadly appropriate. So please, take a moment to bask in some genuine awe and happiness from this story.
A team from the Institute for Conservation Research of the San Diego Zoo Global and the Loisaba Conservancy in Kenya confirmed the existence of black leopards — as the animals are also known — in Laikipia County, an area north of Nairobi, Kenya’s capital.
“It is certain black panthers have been there all along, but good footage that could confirm it has always been absent until now,” Nicholas Pilfold, a biologist at the San Diego institute, said in an Instagram post on Tuesday.
At this very moment, a Red Headed Woodpecker is pecking away at the suet feeder just outside my window. After decades of plunging numbers, in 2018 the International Union for Conservation of Nature did something that’s increasing rare — it removed this lovely bird from the list of threatened species and placed it to the list of “least concerned.” Numbers of red headed woodpeckers appear to have stabilized, and its appearing now in some areas where it hasn’t been seen in a long time. Like my backyard. Take your wins where you can find them.
Vanity Fair: on “The threat worse than Trump”
Nick Bilton
Donald Trump has turned back more climate-related safety measures in the past year than any president in history—a precedent that is perhaps even scarier than the game of nuclear chicken he is playing with Kim Jong Un. Jeff Orlowski, the Oscar short-listed filmmaker behind Chasing Coral and Chasing Ice, joins me on the latest episode of Inside the Hive to lay out the implications of our warming planet, how most of the coral reefs on Earth are dying, and why that is even more terrifying than you think. Orlowski explains that we could be at the beginning of the sixth mass extinction.
This is the first time I’ve pasted a podcast into the Science Round-up. I’ll await feedback.
National Geographic: Celebrating World Pangolin Day
Rachael Bale
They look like reptiles, all covered in scales. They look like armadillos, the way they roll up in a ball. They look like anteaters, with those long snouts and tongues. And they look like dinosaurs, lumbering and ancient.
Pangolins are unlike any other animal I’ve ever seen. They’re distantly related to bears and dogs, but they’re in their own taxonomic family. And they’re mammals—the world’s only mammal with real scales. But when I met pangolins for the first time in real life, what surprised me most was their personalities. Tamuda was bold and stubborn. Luleko was shy and sweet. Both had been rescued from the illegal wildlife trade in Zimbabwe and were recovering in the care of the Tikki Hywood Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to wildlife rescue and conservation. Pangolins are among the most widely poached mammals—their scales are in demand for use in traditional Chinese medicine.
The highlight of this article is a dozen photographs of pangolins, which I sadly cannot reproduce here. But your day Will Be Better if you click through to look.
Metascience
Ars Technica: On why the “replication crisis” may not be what it seems.
Cathleen O’Grady
A bit of introduction: The “replication crisis” is a concern that has hit several areas of science over the last few years. That crisis is simply the fact that scientists attempting to replicate studies, including some famous studies, have been unable to duplicate some results. That has turned up some serious flaws in some experiments, but it has also brought disturbing uncertainty even in cases where the original studies didn’t seem to contain obvious flaws. The crisis has been particularly acute in “softer” sciences, such as psychology and sociology, where it has cast doubt on some of the most iconic and widely cited theories.
A replication crisis has called into question results from behavioral (and other) sciences. Complaints have focused on poor statistical methods, the burying of negative results, and other “questionable research practices” that undermine the quality of individual studies.
But methods are only part of the problem, as Michael Muthukrishna and Joseph Henrich argue in a paper in Nature Human Behaviour this week. It’s not just that individual puzzle pieces are low in quality; it’s also that there’s not enough effort to fit those pieces into a coherent picture. "Without an overarching theoretical framework,” write Muthukrishna and Henrich, “empirical programs spawn and grow from personal intuitions and culturally biased folk theories.”
Basically, there is still so much that we don’t know about consciousness, decision making, and the absolute basics of what making “thinking” work, that even when a study returns results, we don’t know what those results mean. Without fitting them into a larger picture, the fact that a similar study returns different results could invalidate the first set of results, or … not. We don’t know enough to know what what don’t know.
Doing research in a way that emphasizes joining the dots constrains the questions you can ask in your research, says Muthukrishna. Without a theoretical framework, “the number of questions that you can ask is infinite.” This makes for a scattered, disconnected body of research. It also feeds into the statistical problems that are widely considered the source of the replication crisis. Having too many questions leads to a large number of small experiments—and the researchers doing them don't always lay out a strong hypothesis and its predictions before they start gathering data.
The result are fields that dominated by things like the “marshmallow experiment,” because these little things are easy to do, easy to document, and almost certain to gain folkloric status. They also may mean absolutely nothing.
Having a good theoretical framework makes it possible to make sense of sets of disconnected facts, and to explain why things happen sometimes and not at other times. Perhaps most importantly, it allows for predictions of what will be found in the data: if our model of human evolution is true, we could predict that we should find huge similarities in the genomes of humans and other great apes—and that’s exactly what we do find. If we made a prediction like this and found it to be false—say, our genomes turned out to be more similar to birds than to other great apes—it would undermine the theoretical framework.
Nature: The Indian government offers to pay students for research papers.
Gayathri Vaidyanathan
Indian scientists are criticizing a government proposal to pay graduate students who publish in select journals. They fear that it could degrade the quality of research and lead to an increase in scientific misconduct, by incentivizing publishing rather than good science.
Under the proposal by a central government committee, PhD students who publish in “reputed” international journals would receive a one-time payment of 50,000 rupees (about US$700), while students who publish in select domestic journals would earn 20,000 rupees. The cash bonuses for publishing are more than a typical graduate student's monthly stipend.
Wait. Monthly stipends are a thing? I mopped the offices for $2 an hour and still had to play TA for free. Times have changed. (And now, my story about walking 12 miles to school. Uphill. Both ways. And then maybe the story where I admit tuition was $300 a quarter.)
Social Sciences
PNAS: Crowdsourcing the fight against real ‘fake news’ on social media.
Gordon Pennycook and David Rand
Reducing the spread of misinformation, especially on social media, is a major challenge. We investigate one potential approach: having social media platform algorithms preferentially display content from news sources that users rate as trustworthy. To do so, we ask whether crowdsourced trust ratings can effectively differentiate more versus less reliable sources. We ran two preregistered experiments where individuals rated familiarity with, and trust in, 60 news sources from three categories: (i) mainstream media outlets, (ii) hyperpartisan websites, and (iii) websites that produce blatantly false content (“fake news”). Despite substantial partisan differences, we find that laypeople across the political spectrum rated mainstream sources as far more trustworthy than either hyperpartisan or fake news sources. Although this difference was larger for Democrats than Republicans—mostly due to distrust of mainstream sources by Republicans—every mainstream source (with one exception) was rated as more trustworthy than every hyperpartisan or fake news source across both studies when equally weighting ratings of Democrats and Republicans. Furthermore, politically balanced layperson ratings were strongly correlated with ratings provided by professional fact-checkers. We also found that, particularly among liberals, individuals higher in cognitive reflection were better able to discern between low- and high-quality sources. Finally, we found that excluding ratings from participants who were not familiar with a given news source dramatically reduced the effectiveness of the crowd. Our findings indicate that having algorithms up-rank content from trusted media outlets may be a promising approach for fighting the spread of misinformation on social media.
By golly, I think they’ve done a research project to discover Daily Kos community ratings.